Are you trying to take back your words without getting noticed? I was trying to remind you of what those words actually were, because you seemed to be arguing against something you made up and falsely attributed to me.
See if you can remember writing this: "If I tell you about a number that represents the new Indiana Jones movie, I'm "informing" you". That sentence doesn't imply equating entertainment to information, in your mind? No, not at all. The number is data, i.e. information, no matter what it happens to encode. A number representing a movie is information just like the number representing the speed of light is also information. When you tell someone what those numbers are, you're giving them information.
What you can do with one of those numbers is up to you and whoever encoded it. Maybe you can plug it into a mathematical formula, or maybe you can run it through a series of codecs and make an entertaining picture on your screen.
Either way, the eventual purpose that the information is used for doesn't change the fact that it is information.
Now, have you thought of a way yet to prevent people from sharing entertainment without restricting the information they're allowed to share?
And yet there is no fundamental human right to get entertainment for free. Agreed. The existence of such a right would mean someone were obligated to provide it, and of course no one is obligated to share it with anyone.
They are, however, morally entitled to share it by encoding it in the form of information, since sharing information is their fundamental human right, and if someone volunteers to share a copy with you, you have every right to accept it from them.
Look near the CD border. You're welcome. Hmm, nope. It says nothing about any license or agreement there; try again. (You might want to actually look at a CD this time, to avoid another one of these embarrassing mistakes.)
Even if there were something there about a license or agreement, you can't seriously be saying that something written on the inside of a sealed package can define the terms of the original purchase! The terms are defined before the purchase, or they aren't defined at all. (Software EULAs are mentioned on the outside of the package, where you can learn about them before buying, and even then they're not legally valid in all jurisdictions.)
Akin to saying that, since a car thief never agreed to any "restrictive terms" when he stole a car, he is entitled to sharing it. In other words, bullshit. Yes, your analogy is bullshit, because stealing a car against the wishes of its owner isn't comparable to receiving a file from someone who willingly sends it to you.
I don't think so: your point is (was?) that entertainment is information. No, actually, it wasn't. What I said was that copying without permission "isn't wrong, because sharing information is a fundamental human right. If you want to restrict the kinds of information I'm allowed to share, it'd better be because sharing it would harm someone."
If you can think of a way to prevent people from sharing entertainment without restricting the information they're allowed to share, I'm all ears.
There simply is no "fundamental human right" to get entertainment without paying for it. And yet there is a fundamental human right to share information, which allows the people you share with to get entertainment without paying for it. What a paradox!
No, that's my way of saying your argument is bollocks. Whether you buy software, a music CD or a video DVD, it comes with a license saying that you can't give away copies. Does it? I've certainly never seen one except on software. In fact, I'm looking at a pile of music CDs right now, and none of the cases mention any kind of license.
What form would this supposed license take, anyway? What could they offer in exchange for my cooperation that would persuade me to agree? I already have the right to listen to it, just by virtue of having bought it. And they can't force me through a clickwrap process like software installers can, so I don't see (1) where these license terms supposedly appear, (2) why anyone would need to agree to them, or (3) how they would signal their agreement or disagreement.
Anyway, buying a product on certain terms, and then breaking the deal is not OK, even from a moral standpoint. Agreed. But that still doesn't address the common case where someone obtains a copy without agreeing to any any restrictive terms -- say, by downloading a torrent -- and then proceeds to share it.
Data is information, sure. Entertainment is not, even when it's made of data. Thanks, you've made my point for me. Entertainment can be encoded as information; therefore, if you want to stop people from sharing entertainment, you must restrict their fundamental human right to share information.
Of course he is - that's true of any property ownership, you know. Well, no, it isn't. You don't need anyone else's cooperation in order to have the right to use your property as you see fit.
If no one wants to play ping-pong with me, I can't complain that they're infringing my right to use my ping-pong table: "use" doesn't extend to forcing people to play if they don't want to.
Likewise, if no one wants to buy your CD, that doesn't mean your right to use the CD has been infringed. You can still do whatever you want with it, by yourself, but the right to use it doesn't extend to forcing people to buy it when they aren't willing to pay your asking price.
The ownership of property, whether it is "real"/tangible or intangible is a fiction: Humans made it up, and the only way it works successfully is for everyone to play along. That wasn't really what I was talking about - I was talking about playing along with a particular use, not with the general idea of ownership.
But frankly, I'd argue that most property ownership does work even if no one else wants to respect it. Physical property is something that stays where you leave it unless it's moved, and you can notice when someone's about to move it and get in their way. It's more practical to keep your property when you can trust other people to respect it while you're away, but even if they don't, you can still defend your property yourself with a shotgun.
That doesn't apply to intellectual "property", of course. But then, intellectual works don't need owners anyway. Ownership is a way to resolve conflicts over how a piece of property is to be used: I can't drive this car to New York at the same time as someone else is driving it to San Diego, so somehow, we need to decide which one of us will get to drive it.
That conflict simply doesn't exist with ideas and information, since they can be everywhere at once, and it's impossible for one person's use of one copy to conflict with anyone else's use of another copy.
Copyrights are like that: You might not like them, but it isn't necessary for you to do so. Indeed. It's easy to ignore copyright and just do what you want to do anyway, as long as you're not attracting too much attention. If it weren't -- if copyright laws were actually effective at stopping peer-to-peer sharing -- I think we'd see a much bigger public backlash.
I guess you didn't even bother reading the page, just hit Ctrl+F and searched for the word "entertainment".
If you had read it, you would've realized that those definitions are exactly what I've been using through this entire thread, such as when I wrote "Any sequence of bits sent over a TCP socket is information". Data is information, whether it represents entertainment or anything else.
Of course, you knew that already. You're just trolling, right?
ROTFL. Just because you didn't sign the EULA that came with your software, it doesn't mean it's not there. It's funny how, immediately after quoting a part of my post about radio, TV, books, and DVDs, you decided to write a response about software instead. I guess that's your way of conceding the argument.
Oh, in that case when they bust your butt for copyright infringement, you can use it as a line of defense in the courtroom: "I'm innocent your honor! I got my copy from a pirate, not from a store!". Again, you quoted a part of my post about one thing (morality and fraud) but your response is about something completely different (the legality of copyright infringement). Thanks for conceding twice; I wasn't sure if you meant it the first time.
That's the same thing. You "lose" those potential customers and the money they might conceivably have given you. It's still not harm, though. You might as well complain about all the millions of dollars you "lose" when you pick the wrong lottery numbers. Don't count your chickens before they hatch, and it won't be a problem.
As I've pointed out numerous times, however, the same loss of revenue happens on a larger scale when someone writes a bad review. Or, for that matter, when a competitor offers a similar product at a lower price. If you think potential revenue is worth stifling speech over, you have much more pressing things to deal with.
People know they are taking a risk when they copy It's an insignificant risk. Statistically speaking, you're more likely to die in an accidental fall than be sued for copyright infringement.
What you're arguing here is more or less that you can't exercise your right to use your own property unless other people will play along with that use. You're saying that you don't really have the right to sell your property unless someone else is willing to buy it. But that, sir, is an argument in bad faith. You're conflating one person's rights with everyone else's obligations.
As well, sharing a person's work without paying is likely to cause them actual financial harm. No, it isn't. Financial harm means losing money, and you can't lose money that isn't yours.
If you think I might give you a dollar, and then I don't, you haven't been harmed at all. That dollar is mine, not yours, even though you'd like it to become yours.
If you share a copyrighted work, you're defrauding whoever you took it from: they sold you that copy on the mutual agreement that you would have used it for yourself and not given it away, when in fact you are doing the opposite. You are the one in breach, and no amount of analogies is going to change that. Nonsense. When was the last time you had to sign an agreement when you turned on the radio or TV, or bought a book or DVD? What makes you think this "mutual agreement" actually exists anywhere outside of your imagination?
And, for that matter, what if you get the copy from a pirate rather than a store? Millions of people are willing to distribute copies online, and they don't ask the recipient not to share. In fact, they usually expect that the recipient will share it.
You might argue that the first pirate in the chain is still acting dishonestly (if he actually did agree not to distribute his copy, which of course he didn't), but obviously the last pirate in the chain isn't defrauding anyone. He got the copy from someone who expected him to share it, and he's sharing it himself with the expectation that it'll be shared again.
"Information" has multiple definitions, and the one you're trying to use now is different from the one I've been using all along. I'm not going to play semantic games.
No, he can't. When something is available for free, no author can still sell it as "he was ever able to do before". Sure he can; there's nothing preventing someone from giving him money. He might not sell as many copies as he'd like, because now there's a cheaper alternative, but that's something every businessman has to deal with. When someone else is offering an equivalent product for less, you have to either lower your price or offer something better than the competition.
But that's still not a limitation on the author. The author is able to sell copies, but his potential customers aren't willing to buy them, just like they might not be willing to buy a copy if they've read a bad review.
Therefore, the author is deprived of the right to use HIS OWN work as he pleases. What silliness. If people don't want to buy the product I'm selling, I'm not being "deprived" of anything. It's my responsibility to offer a product people want at a price they're willing to pay.
Because if the author wants his right to be exclusive, his will MUST be respected and it is morally and legally WRONG not to comply. I'm afraid caps lock isn't a very convincing argument. Why "MUST" his will be respected? Just because you say so?
Illegal != immoral, you know. If you want to convince anyone that making copies without permission is immoral, you're going to have to do better than that.
Bullshit. You never had any "exclusive" to begin with, because you didn't buy any exclusive right from the Ferrari's makers. Then what makes you think an author had an "exclusive" to begin with? Who did he buy it from? Who agreed not to make copies?
No one did. As far as I can tell, you just expect us to agree that authors are entitled to these exclusive rights because they want them. Well, I want a lot of things too, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to them.
Do you feel the same way concerning laws like HIPAA? They are, after all, trying to fight large forces that want access to your information. You could easily give up here, and say "too hard to lock down this information, don't bother". I'd say that sharing a person's medical information is likely to cause them actual harm. Sometimes it is worth spending the effort to stifle speech: outlawing fraud and the shouting of "fire" in a crowded theater are other examples.
But, importantly for cases like this, keeping private information private is a lot more practical than keeping public information private. Very few people have a copy of my medical records in the first place, so it's not too hard to keep an eye on them. If, on the other hand, I had sold copies of my medical information to a million strangers, it'd be pretty unreasonable for me to expect to keep all of them from sharing it.
Yet the business still exists and is making money. That's because for a relatively brief time, it was practical for companies to mass-produce and sell copies, but not for individuals to make their own copies. That time has now passed.
The question is will it remain so? Is the fight impossible? I don't think the conclusion is foregone, neither do I accept the position that people violating copyright are on the high ground. I think it is foregone. Individuals want to share this stuff, and there's no practical way to keep them from doing it. Copyright infringement on a massive scale is now something anyone can take part in, and despite the industry's efforts, it isn't going away.
No one is deprived of the thing being copied, sure. But an author is deprived of his exclusive right to use his own work as he pleases. That's all that matters, really. But that doesn't make any sense: the author isn't deprived of the right to use his own work. He still has his own copy, and he can still do anything with it that he was ever able to do before I made my own copy.
That's the fundamental nature of information: it's impossible for me to prevent him from doing anything he wants with his copy, just like it's impossible for him to prevent me from doing whatever I want with my copy (including sharing it with a friend).
If you're resting your point on the word "exclusive", well, you'll have to explain why the ability to use a work should rightfully be "exclusive" in the first place.
I mean, if I buy the first Ferrari in town, I have something no one else in town does. Now if my neighbor buys his own Ferrari, I've lost that "exclusive", but he hasn't harmed me. I'm not entitled to decide who's allowed to own a Ferrari. Why should we believe that anyone is entitled to decide who can have a copy of a book, a movie, or a song?
Physical property is something where exclusives make sense. A widget can only be in one place at a time, and someone has to decide where it's going to be: that person is the owner. But there's no such restriction on information and ideas. It just doesn't make sense to grant anyone exclusive control of them.
Entertainment != Information. Any sequence of bits sent over a TCP socket is information, whether it represents a Hollywood movie or an educational text file.
If I tell you about a number that represents the new Indiana Jones movie, I'm "informing" you just as if I'd told you about a number that represents the speed of light or the phone number for the White House switchboard. You didn't know which number could be run through a series of codecs to produce the movie; now you do.
To quote a funny and enlightening sig I've read here on./:
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap. Funny, maybe, but not enlightening.
As I've said before, I have no problem with people being paid for the work they do. But they don't need copyright in order to get paid; all they need is to abandon the model of doing the work up front for free and then selling copies later.
"information wants to be free" -- annoyingly simplistic slogan. Some people want the information to be free, some do not. The information itself doesn't want anything, unless you want to get all philosophical. Well, obviously, information itself doesn't have desires. Information "wants" to be free in the same way that a boulder "wants" to roll downhill.
A force (gravity) acts on the boulder, and although you can expend some effort to keep it at the top of the hill, it's a constant battle. You wouldn't try to build a business on the assumption that boulders are always at the top of hills, never at the bottom, because it's just not practical to keep every boulder from rolling downhill forever.
Likewise, a force (the human desire to share) acts on information, and although you can expend some effort to stop people from sharing, it's a constant battle. It's just as foolish to build a business on the assumption that people will have to buy certain information from you, rather than sharing it with each other, because it's just not practical to maintain that kind of control.
It's also a fact that a small piece of paper made in a certain way is a banknote. Are you implying there's nothing wrong in printing your own money? If you spend a counterfeit note, you're defrauding whoever you give it to: they value that note because they believe it was printed by the treasury, when in fact it wasn't, and you use that deception to get something of value.
The same applies to trademarks, by the way. If you build a car in your back yard and then try to sell it as a "Honda Civic", that's fraud. Your customers reasonably expect that a car known as a "Honda Civic" will have been made by a certain company, using certain designs and materials, meeting certain quality standards and so on; but yours isn't, and you take advantage of that deception to make a profit.
The moral difference is quite clear: If someone gave you a vague recollection of what he saw at the movies, it wouldn't replace the experience of actually seeing the movie. Watching a copied movie does. On the contrary: hearing an accurate description certainly can replace the experience of actually seeing the movie, if it convinces a potential viewer that the movie isn't worth seeing.
That's why I brought up reviews. If I write a review that convinces a hundred people not to see Baby Geniuses because it's a bad movie, I've caused exactly as much loss of revenue as if I'd given them each a copy and allowed them to watch it for free. If loss of potential revenue is an acceptable reason to limit speech, then surely we should be more worried about negative reviews!
It's actually quite the opposite. When arts were funded almost exclusively by patronage, most of it was designed to be crowd pleasing. Music and drama had to be made in time to fit the schedule and habits of whichever monarch or aristocrat gave the money. Luckily, it's the year 2008 now and we can do a lot better. You don't have to fund production by sucking up to one very rich "patron"; you can go directly to your audience and appeal to all of them at once.
Look at how political candidates raise millions of dollars from small individual contributions through their web sites, and realize that the people sending in money aren't even getting any guarantees in return: they don't know whether it'll be used for TV ads, print ads, or other campaign expenses; they don't know what the content of those ads will be; and of course if their candidate loses, the money is wasted anyway. Now imagine how much more successful it could be in a situation where the people paying do have a pretty good idea of what they'll get in return.
If your point is that the direct-funding model would make it difficult to make money by releasing art no one wants, well, I'm afraid I don't see the problem with that. You're not entitled to get paid for producing stuff that people don't care about.
Wouldn't you be pissed at people sneaking in under the canvas without paying, or copying the T-shirt for their friends?
Sneaking in is trespassing. It deprives me of the exclusive use of my property, because people take up space inside the tent.
Copying the T-shirt for their friends, however, is fine. To stop someone from doing that, I'd have to either prevent him from describing his personal experiences to a friend ("this is what I saw"), or from putting some ink that he owns onto a shirt that he owns.
What right do I have to interfere with either of those? Why should I get to stifle his speech or tell him what to do with his own property? If the only way a person can think of to make money depends on taking rights away from everyone else, he's not thinking hard enough.
You're conveniently leaving out part of the debate; people may not be deprived of the physical thing, but they are being deprived of income they rightfully hoped to make with it. Rightfully, because they are not just showing their works to everyone and them demand payment, like in your analogy; they try and keep a careful control of the works they paid to have produced, and charge a fee to enjoy that work.
They do show the works to everyone when they broadcast them on TV or radio. Making them available to paying customers effectively means making them available to everyone, because you can't expect to control what those customers do or say once they leave the theater: they have the right to describe what they saw to anyone who wants to listen.
Semantically you may be right, but insisting that copyright is not stealing is usually nothing more than a deliberate attempt to cloud the issue, and the fact that it is [i]wrong[/i] to copy an intellectual work without permission. Or perhaps you would argue that it isn't wrong... in that case I expect better arguments than "Hey, it's not stealing...".
I do argue that it isn't wrong, because sharing information is a fundamental human right. If you want to restrict the kinds of information I'm allowed to share, it'd better be because sharing it would harm someone.
Copying a song or a video doesn't cause anyone harm, though. You might argue that losing potential revenue is a kind of harm, but then you'd have to agree that a respected reviewer who says "this sucks, here's why, don't buy it" could easily cause much more loss of revenue. And yet we all recognize his right to share with his readers, even when it affects someone else's bottom line.
Those who pay to have music and movies produced, have the right to ask a price to enjoy those works and set conditions for using them.
I disagree. That "right" is only needed if you're intent on treating music and movies like a widget, something manufactured on an assembly line and sold in discrete units.
But recording a song isn't like soldering parts together: you don't have to do it again every time someone wants a copy. You record it once, and then it's available to everyone who wants it (unless you sue them). Why, then, should you get paid again every time someone gets a copy?
If you want to get paid for the time you spend writing a song, then find someone who'll pay you to write it. Or a whole bunch of someones... sellaband.com is on the right track.
Fair use and sensible consumer protection should apply, but for the rest, if you don't agree with the price or the conditions attached, your only moral option is to not obtain the music or movies, and spend your money elsewhere.
Perhaps you could explain why obtaining them without paying is immoral.
Asking for a copy of a movie is morally equivalent to asking someone to tell you about it in excruciating detail. They're relating facts. It's a fact that Star Wars has light sabers and takes place in a galaxy far, far away; it's a fact that Darth Vader wears a black helmet; it's a fact a certain string of bits makes a JPEG image of th
Not my fault you can't come up with a better argument than "I have a funny shirt," failing to say that you own the copyright for the shirt, you created it, or really anything other than you wearing said shirt. I didn't mention any of that because it's irrelevant. Let me remind you of what you originally wrote, since it was so long ago: you complained about "enjoying something without paying for it when the owner wants you to." Surely you understand how owning a shirt works, right?
Enjoy your stolen music, movies, and software. How amusing that you're making all these assumptions about me just because I've pointed out the flaws in your argument. Try to separate the message from the messenger, and maybe those mean ol' mods won't pick on you so much.
Just remember, you're not depriving anyone of anything. Everyone who has more money than you doesn't need any more. Why are you so fixated on this imaginary backlash against money? I've got no problem with paying people for providing a service. But you don't need a copyright to get paid for working: everyone else in every other field of work manages to get paid for their work without any special monopoly rights.
Gates is evil *waves hands around and makes "oooooh" sounds* RIAA is evil *continues the hands thing* Fair Use applies to the digital world the same way the AK47s are covered by "A well regulated militia... right to bear Arms" I see you're off in your own little world, arguing with strawmen. Well, don't let me disturb you.
What an unsightly persecution complex. You should have that looked at.
The irony of the juxtaposition you create by hating DRM because you have to pay while at the same time stifling free speech when it's not in your best interest gets me through the day still feeling self-righteous. Stifling free speech? No one's deleting your posts (and of course/. doesn't owe you space on their site anyway). They're just pointing out, as a service to other readers, that reading your posts might not be the best use of their time. If people think the moderators are doing a bad job, they can change their own comment preferences.
You know, the moderations here aren't always great, but generally, if you can speak thoughtfully on an issue, you'll get modded up even for going against the "herd" - Slashdot is made up of individuals, not clones, and there are plenty of people who'll agree with whatever beliefs you might have.
But if you're going to respond with insults instead of arguments, or if your arguments are facile ones that everyone who's been around the site for a while has already discarded, expect to get modded down.
If only there was some way to get rid of that pesky +1 karma bonus so your mod downs meant something =) Actually, two negative mods on the same comment will cancel its karma bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
What you can do with one of those numbers is up to you and whoever encoded it. Maybe you can plug it into a mathematical formula, or maybe you can run it through a series of codecs and make an entertaining picture on your screen.
Either way, the eventual purpose that the information is used for doesn't change the fact that it is information.
Now, have you thought of a way yet to prevent people from sharing entertainment without restricting the information they're allowed to share? And yet there is no fundamental human right to get entertainment for free. Agreed. The existence of such a right would mean someone were obligated to provide it, and of course no one is obligated to share it with anyone.
They are, however, morally entitled to share it by encoding it in the form of information, since sharing information is their fundamental human right, and if someone volunteers to share a copy with you, you have every right to accept it from them.
Even if there were something there about a license or agreement, you can't seriously be saying that something written on the inside of a sealed package can define the terms of the original purchase! The terms are defined before the purchase, or they aren't defined at all. (Software EULAs are mentioned on the outside of the package, where you can learn about them before buying, and even then they're not legally valid in all jurisdictions.) Akin to saying that, since a car thief never agreed to any "restrictive terms" when he stole a car, he is entitled to sharing it. In other words, bullshit. Yes, your analogy is bullshit, because stealing a car against the wishes of its owner isn't comparable to receiving a file from someone who willingly sends it to you.
If you can think of a way to prevent people from sharing entertainment without restricting the information they're allowed to share, I'm all ears. There simply is no "fundamental human right" to get entertainment without paying for it. And yet there is a fundamental human right to share information, which allows the people you share with to get entertainment without paying for it. What a paradox!
What form would this supposed license take, anyway? What could they offer in exchange for my cooperation that would persuade me to agree? I already have the right to listen to it, just by virtue of having bought it. And they can't force me through a clickwrap process like software installers can, so I don't see (1) where these license terms supposedly appear, (2) why anyone would need to agree to them, or (3) how they would signal their agreement or disagreement. Anyway, buying a product on certain terms, and then breaking the deal is not OK, even from a moral standpoint. Agreed. But that still doesn't address the common case where someone obtains a copy without agreeing to any any restrictive terms -- say, by downloading a torrent -- and then proceeds to share it.
If no one wants to play ping-pong with me, I can't complain that they're infringing my right to use my ping-pong table: "use" doesn't extend to forcing people to play if they don't want to.
Likewise, if no one wants to buy your CD, that doesn't mean your right to use the CD has been infringed. You can still do whatever you want with it, by yourself, but the right to use it doesn't extend to forcing people to buy it when they aren't willing to pay your asking price. The ownership of property, whether it is "real"/tangible or intangible is a fiction: Humans made it up, and the only way it works successfully is for everyone to play along. That wasn't really what I was talking about - I was talking about playing along with a particular use, not with the general idea of ownership.
But frankly, I'd argue that most property ownership does work even if no one else wants to respect it. Physical property is something that stays where you leave it unless it's moved, and you can notice when someone's about to move it and get in their way. It's more practical to keep your property when you can trust other people to respect it while you're away, but even if they don't, you can still defend your property yourself with a shotgun.
That doesn't apply to intellectual "property", of course. But then, intellectual works don't need owners anyway. Ownership is a way to resolve conflicts over how a piece of property is to be used: I can't drive this car to New York at the same time as someone else is driving it to San Diego, so somehow, we need to decide which one of us will get to drive it.
That conflict simply doesn't exist with ideas and information, since they can be everywhere at once, and it's impossible for one person's use of one copy to conflict with anyone else's use of another copy. Copyrights are like that: You might not like them, but it isn't necessary for you to do so. Indeed. It's easy to ignore copyright and just do what you want to do anyway, as long as you're not attracting too much attention. If it weren't -- if copyright laws were actually effective at stopping peer-to-peer sharing -- I think we'd see a much bigger public backlash.
I guess you didn't even bother reading the page, just hit Ctrl+F and searched for the word "entertainment".
If you had read it, you would've realized that those definitions are exactly what I've been using through this entire thread, such as when I wrote "Any sequence of bits sent over a TCP socket is information". Data is information, whether it represents entertainment or anything else.
Of course, you knew that already. You're just trolling, right?
That's the same thing. You "lose" those potential customers and the money they might conceivably have given you. It's still not harm, though. You might as well complain about all the millions of dollars you "lose" when you pick the wrong lottery numbers. Don't count your chickens before they hatch, and it won't be a problem.
As I've pointed out numerous times, however, the same loss of revenue happens on a larger scale when someone writes a bad review. Or, for that matter, when a competitor offers a similar product at a lower price. If you think potential revenue is worth stifling speech over, you have much more pressing things to deal with.
Merriam-Webster, definitions 2a(3) and 2b. Glad to help you learn English!
Actually, I think it proves the opposite.
What you're arguing here is more or less that you can't exercise your right to use your own property unless other people will play along with that use. You're saying that you don't really have the right to sell your property unless someone else is willing to buy it. But that, sir, is an argument in bad faith. You're conflating one person's rights with everyone else's obligations.
If you think I might give you a dollar, and then I don't, you haven't been harmed at all. That dollar is mine, not yours, even though you'd like it to become yours.
And, for that matter, what if you get the copy from a pirate rather than a store? Millions of people are willing to distribute copies online, and they don't ask the recipient not to share. In fact, they usually expect that the recipient will share it.
You might argue that the first pirate in the chain is still acting dishonestly (if he actually did agree not to distribute his copy, which of course he didn't), but obviously the last pirate in the chain isn't defrauding anyone. He got the copy from someone who expected him to share it, and he's sharing it himself with the expectation that it'll be shared again.
"Information" has multiple definitions, and the one you're trying to use now is different from the one I've been using all along. I'm not going to play semantic games.
But that's still not a limitation on the author. The author is able to sell copies, but his potential customers aren't willing to buy them, just like they might not be willing to buy a copy if they've read a bad review. Therefore, the author is deprived of the right to use HIS OWN work as he pleases. What silliness. If people don't want to buy the product I'm selling, I'm not being "deprived" of anything. It's my responsibility to offer a product people want at a price they're willing to pay. Because if the author wants his right to be exclusive, his will MUST be respected and it is morally and legally WRONG not to comply. I'm afraid caps lock isn't a very convincing argument. Why "MUST" his will be respected? Just because you say so?
Illegal != immoral, you know. If you want to convince anyone that making copies without permission is immoral, you're going to have to do better than that. Bullshit. You never had any "exclusive" to begin with, because you didn't buy any exclusive right from the Ferrari's makers. Then what makes you think an author had an "exclusive" to begin with? Who did he buy it from? Who agreed not to make copies?
No one did. As far as I can tell, you just expect us to agree that authors are entitled to these exclusive rights because they want them. Well, I want a lot of things too, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to them.
But, importantly for cases like this, keeping private information private is a lot more practical than keeping public information private. Very few people have a copy of my medical records in the first place, so it's not too hard to keep an eye on them. If, on the other hand, I had sold copies of my medical information to a million strangers, it'd be pretty unreasonable for me to expect to keep all of them from sharing it. Yet the business still exists and is making money. That's because for a relatively brief time, it was practical for companies to mass-produce and sell copies, but not for individuals to make their own copies. That time has now passed. The question is will it remain so? Is the fight impossible? I don't think the conclusion is foregone, neither do I accept the position that people violating copyright are on the high ground. I think it is foregone. Individuals want to share this stuff, and there's no practical way to keep them from doing it. Copyright infringement on a massive scale is now something anyone can take part in, and despite the industry's efforts, it isn't going away.
That's the fundamental nature of information: it's impossible for me to prevent him from doing anything he wants with his copy, just like it's impossible for him to prevent me from doing whatever I want with my copy (including sharing it with a friend).
If you're resting your point on the word "exclusive", well, you'll have to explain why the ability to use a work should rightfully be "exclusive" in the first place.
I mean, if I buy the first Ferrari in town, I have something no one else in town does. Now if my neighbor buys his own Ferrari, I've lost that "exclusive", but he hasn't harmed me. I'm not entitled to decide who's allowed to own a Ferrari. Why should we believe that anyone is entitled to decide who can have a copy of a book, a movie, or a song?
Physical property is something where exclusives make sense. A widget can only be in one place at a time, and someone has to decide where it's going to be: that person is the owner. But there's no such restriction on information and ideas. It just doesn't make sense to grant anyone exclusive control of them.
If I tell you about a number that represents the new Indiana Jones movie, I'm "informing" you just as if I'd told you about a number that represents the speed of light or the phone number for the White House switchboard. You didn't know which number could be run through a series of codecs to produce the movie; now you do. To quote a funny and enlightening sig I've read here on
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap. Funny, maybe, but not enlightening.
As I've said before, I have no problem with people being paid for the work they do. But they don't need copyright in order to get paid; all they need is to abandon the model of doing the work up front for free and then selling copies later.
A force (gravity) acts on the boulder, and although you can expend some effort to keep it at the top of the hill, it's a constant battle. You wouldn't try to build a business on the assumption that boulders are always at the top of hills, never at the bottom, because it's just not practical to keep every boulder from rolling downhill forever.
Likewise, a force (the human desire to share) acts on information, and although you can expend some effort to stop people from sharing, it's a constant battle. It's just as foolish to build a business on the assumption that people will have to buy certain information from you, rather than sharing it with each other, because it's just not practical to maintain that kind of control.
The same applies to trademarks, by the way. If you build a car in your back yard and then try to sell it as a "Honda Civic", that's fraud. Your customers reasonably expect that a car known as a "Honda Civic" will have been made by a certain company, using certain designs and materials, meeting certain quality standards and so on; but yours isn't, and you take advantage of that deception to make a profit.
That's why I brought up reviews. If I write a review that convinces a hundred people not to see Baby Geniuses because it's a bad movie, I've caused exactly as much loss of revenue as if I'd given them each a copy and allowed them to watch it for free. If loss of potential revenue is an acceptable reason to limit speech, then surely we should be more worried about negative reviews! It's actually quite the opposite. When arts were funded almost exclusively by patronage, most of it was designed to be crowd pleasing. Music and drama had to be made in time to fit the schedule and habits of whichever monarch or aristocrat gave the money. Luckily, it's the year 2008 now and we can do a lot better. You don't have to fund production by sucking up to one very rich "patron"; you can go directly to your audience and appeal to all of them at once.
Look at how political candidates raise millions of dollars from small individual contributions through their web sites, and realize that the people sending in money aren't even getting any guarantees in return: they don't know whether it'll be used for TV ads, print ads, or other campaign expenses; they don't know what the content of those ads will be; and of course if their candidate loses, the money is wasted anyway. Now imagine how much more successful it could be in a situation where the people paying do have a pretty good idea of what they'll get in return.
If your point is that the direct-funding model would make it difficult to make money by releasing art no one wants, well, I'm afraid I don't see the problem with that. You're not entitled to get paid for producing stuff that people don't care about.
Wouldn't you be pissed at people sneaking in under the canvas without paying, or copying the T-shirt for their friends?
Sneaking in is trespassing. It deprives me of the exclusive use of my property, because people take up space inside the tent.
Copying the T-shirt for their friends, however, is fine. To stop someone from doing that, I'd have to either prevent him from describing his personal experiences to a friend ("this is what I saw"), or from putting some ink that he owns onto a shirt that he owns.
What right do I have to interfere with either of those? Why should I get to stifle his speech or tell him what to do with his own property? If the only way a person can think of to make money depends on taking rights away from everyone else, he's not thinking hard enough.
You're conveniently leaving out part of the debate; people may not be deprived of the physical thing, but they are being deprived of income they rightfully hoped to make with it. Rightfully, because they are not just showing their works to everyone and them demand payment, like in your analogy; they try and keep a careful control of the works they paid to have produced, and charge a fee to enjoy that work.
They do show the works to everyone when they broadcast them on TV or radio. Making them available to paying customers effectively means making them available to everyone, because you can't expect to control what those customers do or say once they leave the theater: they have the right to describe what they saw to anyone who wants to listen.
Semantically you may be right, but insisting that copyright is not stealing is usually nothing more than a deliberate attempt to cloud the issue, and the fact that it is [i]wrong[/i] to copy an intellectual work without permission. Or perhaps you would argue that it isn't wrong... in that case I expect better arguments than "Hey, it's not stealing...".
I do argue that it isn't wrong, because sharing information is a fundamental human right. If you want to restrict the kinds of information I'm allowed to share, it'd better be because sharing it would harm someone.
Copying a song or a video doesn't cause anyone harm, though. You might argue that losing potential revenue is a kind of harm, but then you'd have to agree that a respected reviewer who says "this sucks, here's why, don't buy it" could easily cause much more loss of revenue. And yet we all recognize his right to share with his readers, even when it affects someone else's bottom line.
Those who pay to have music and movies produced, have the right to ask a price to enjoy those works and set conditions for using them.
I disagree. That "right" is only needed if you're intent on treating music and movies like a widget, something manufactured on an assembly line and sold in discrete units.
But recording a song isn't like soldering parts together: you don't have to do it again every time someone wants a copy. You record it once, and then it's available to everyone who wants it (unless you sue them). Why, then, should you get paid again every time someone gets a copy?
If you want to get paid for the time you spend writing a song, then find someone who'll pay you to write it. Or a whole bunch of someones... sellaband.com is on the right track.
Fair use and sensible consumer protection should apply, but for the rest, if you don't agree with the price or the conditions attached, your only moral option is to not obtain the music or movies, and spend your money elsewhere.
Perhaps you could explain why obtaining them without paying is immoral.
Asking for a copy of a movie is morally equivalent to asking someone to tell you about it in excruciating detail. They're relating facts. It's a fact that Star Wars has light sabers and takes place in a galaxy far, far away; it's a fact that Darth Vader wears a black helmet; it's a fact a certain string of bits makes a JPEG image of th
You know, the moderations here aren't always great, but generally, if you can speak thoughtfully on an issue, you'll get modded up even for going against the "herd" - Slashdot is made up of individuals, not clones, and there are plenty of people who'll agree with whatever beliefs you might have.
But if you're going to respond with insults instead of arguments, or if your arguments are facile ones that everyone who's been around the site for a while has already discarded, expect to get modded down. If only there was some way to get rid of that pesky +1 karma bonus so your mod downs meant something =) Actually, two negative mods on the same comment will cancel its karma bonus.