That money isn't owed to you just because you want it. The song isn't yours because you want it. The money is owed to me for the song I sold you.
you presume you're entitled to tell me not to download it. No, you presume you're entitled to download it without paying me.
Sharing information is free speech. And stealing a product is still theft. You want free speech -- go record your own song instead of stealing mine.
I owe the power company for the service of pushing electrons through a wire, not for the information contained in the waveform. Whatever dude -- you paid for a pattern. You can be pedantic about it in one context but see the bigger picture in another. Real convenient.
The words in a book are a pattern, yes, just like software. And that means they aren't property either. I recommend you try to walk out of Barnes and Noble with your next book -- but just pay them the actual cost of the paper and printing -- 5 cents (perhaps less). After all, the words are not property in your universe..
Oh, so now you agree that I have the right to burn whatever sequence of bits to a disc I want, regardless of whether any third party gives me permission? After all, that only involves my property, not theirs, and certainly doesn't involve any kind of sale. Correct -- just don't download stuff illegally. What part of that didn't you get? I even specifically called it out when I said you should be able to burn limitless copies of the songs (and by extension games, applications) you own -- your 'fair use' needs to be protected. (yes, yours too, much as it disgusts me). You still don't have the right to download stuff illegally. And you can't sell these limitless burned copies without the express consent of the copyright holder. There see? Both party's rights get protected. Neither party's rights are absolute.
Right, but they obviously do have a monopoly in the particular OS known as "Windows". No one else is allowed to sell a disc containing the same number that's on a Windows disc. When only one firm is allowed to sell a certain product, that's a monopoly no matter how you dress it up. Oh good greif. You know what? Just to make some headway, I'll concede this point to you. After all, going by the dictionary definition of monopoly, there is the exclusive 'right' to do something. But in all fairness the original context in which monopoly was brought up was an economic one -- and there monopoly is measured over markets. Plus, even for the exclusivity point, so what? The vendor has rights. Exclusive or otherwise. They created the product -- they have the exclusive right to profit from it -- simple.
Uh huh.. and if they did that, the labels would take such a big cut that AllOfMP3 was no longer competitive.
The labels have every right to do that for their songs
They might price themselves out of the market that way -- but it's their own fault.
They might alienate customers that way -- but it's their own fault.
You still have no right to steal from them.
Allofmp3.com still has no right to sell the songs without authorization
However unpopular the labels might be, they are still forwarding a tiny sliver of the money back to the artists, unlike Allofmp3 that just gets fat.
Well, no. Like I've been saying, they can choose to get paid for making art instead of for making copies, and then they won't have to worry about who's downloading free copies, because they will have already been paid for the time they put into making it. And like I've been saying, you are free to sell your own songs that way if you want, but you have no right to insist that all other artists in the world do that, and you certainly have no right to rip them off by downloading free copies of their songs, unless they said it was ok.
Downloading the song doesn't affect you. It doesn't take anything away from you It deprives me of the income you should have paid me.
Claiming that it still "violates your rights" presumes that you're somehow entitled to tell other people what they can or can't download Not at all -- just that you owe me money for my song.
Again, you presume that you have the right to tell me what I can or can't listen to in the first place. Listen to anything you want -- nobody cares. Just pay me for my song instead of stealing from me.
Ah, I see. You don't believe in a right to free expression and communication. You'll tolerate other people's speech, as long as it doesn't interfere with your bottom line. Is that about right? No, it's completely wrong. Did you just equate piracy with free speech?!? All because you're too cheap to pay me for my song?
The program isn't anyone's property. It's a sequence of bits, a number, a pattern. So is the power in your mains - an AC signal of known amplitude and frequency. You still owe the power company for that pattern. So are the words in a book - just a pattern of charachters. Your argument is hollow -- the program is property.
The computer, however, is undoubtedly my property. Copyright means giving third parties veto power over what I'm allowed to do with that property. No, it only gives them the right to set terms on the sale of their property.
So then, we agree that copyright gives Microsoft a monopoly on Windows? Glad that's cleared up. That makes no sense whatsoever. MS makes an OS called Windows. Windows may or may not have a monopoly in OSes. You are free to make your own OS and compete with MS. Windows is MS's property to sell under the terms it sees fit. Call it anything you want, but your options are simply to buy or do not buy. Using without buying is piracy.
Then why don't they price them lower? Price what lower? Games, movies, operating systems?
The unit cost is ridiculously low, so even selling at $1 per copy would be profitable The unit cost is a lot higher than that, depending on what it is you're selling. How did you arrive at $1?
But with much lower prices, they could make it up in volume.
There's no doubting that you need to price your products correctly, but simply stating that volume compensates for lower prices is oversimplifying, and doesn't have any data to stand on, don't you agree? I mean, if you propose lowering the price of games from $50 to $10, you need to increase sales by 500% to compensate!
And even then, as $10 becomes the norm people will start complaining that it's too high, and maybe if the game cost $2 then nobody will pirate it, and the publishers can make up the difference in volume, etc.
And so far, I do not know ANY copy-protection system which can't be cracked.
But cracks carry with them the risk of future updates not applying, missing functionality, trojans, etc.
Plus, copy-protection is an 80-20 approach like anything else. As long as you can make sure 80% (or some similarly high percentage) of your customer base actually paid for your product, you can recover some of your losses in pricing. It's an example of how people who indulge in piracy actually make the honest ones pay more -- another reason I find some of the arguments on this thread so specious.
Competition would mean I can buy a song for 10 cents from AllOfMP3 instead of for $1 from iTunes, and competitive pressure would eventually push the price down to just above zero (since that's the marginal cost of a copy).
If AllOfMP3 were forwarding a cut of the profits to the artists, and have prior written consent, then and only then are they authorized to actually sell the songs. Until then they're getting fat off the work done by the artists. They're even worse than the music labels because none of that money makes it back to the artists -- it only goes into a pirates pocket.
Competition my ass. This would just mean that artists have a choice between starvation and an alternate career choice.
Actually, I refuse to take a commercial flight EXACTLY because I resent paying to be treated like a sub-human criminal by a bunch of id10ts.
Right -- makes sense. And if you use say, Linux instead of Windows for the same reason, that would make sense too. And only buying non-DRM'd music for that reason makes sense too. That's a principled approach and I respect that.
If you check the thread, along the way, posters are trying to use "being treated like a criminal" as an excuse to justify piracy. That's what I have a problem with. i.e. they can't say "I hate that WGA treats me like a criminal, therefor I shall pirate windows". Or "I hate that iTunes treats me like a criminal, therefore I'll download songs from limewire".
Your examples are poor and bear little relevance to software copy protection You didn't pay attention to the parent post I was refuting then. This are examples of where people allow themselves to be "treated like criminals". Parent's point was "Irrelevant! People have a right to not be treated like a criminal until proven otherwise."
The anti-theft devices are installed while the items are still the property of the store The store is still treating you like a criminal.
Just walk on by that dude and don't surrender your rights so easily. You walked through metal detectors on the way in, and again on the way out. You were treated like a criminal.
Copyright is the restriction. It's more fine-grained than that. Let me explain in detail:
I created a song, therefore I automatically have a copyright on it
I can offer to sell you an MP3 of the song for $1 if I wish
You can accept or reject this offer
If you don't like the price, you still can't download the song for free -- that violates my rights
You might still try to do that, so I might use DRM to protect my rights
The DRM might restrict you to burning to a CD only 5 times, violating your rights. The law should disallow this.
The DRM scheme might be proprietary, not licensed under favorable terms, limiting compatibility and consumer choice. The law should disallow this.
The DRM might prevent you from re-selling the song (like selling a CD you no longer listen to). The law should disallow this (i.e. you should be able to re-sell it)
If you re-sell the song to someone, your copy of it should no longer work. The DRM scheme can be used to enforce that, again, preventing you from violating my rights
Generaically speaking, the DRM scheme might place xyz restriction on you (overreaching - trampling on your rights) - the law should disallow this.
Bottom line: You have rights (fair-use rights). The law needs to identify them clearly, and state that any DRM scheme must honor them. That's how both our rights get enforced. No DRM scheme in existence does that, and that's why we need these laws.
I'm only entitled to a free copy if someone is willing to give me one. Let me correct that for you: You're only entitled to a free copy if the copyright holder is willing to give you one.
It's asking them to stop treading on my rights and the rights of anyone who chooses to offer me a free copy. You never had the right to get a free copy from 'anyone who chooses to offer' it. This 'anyone who chooses to offer it' never had the right to offer it to you for free, unless they have the express, written consent of the copyright holder. This is the fundamental sense of entitlement you seem to have where you're conferring upon yourself rights that you simply don't have.
A program is a number, which no one owns; and if I happen to know that number, I'm entitled to input it into my computer, which I own. A dollar note is just a pattern that no one owns. A car is a particular grouping of molecules that no one owns. A painting is a grouping of colors that nobody owns. A book is a grouping of words that nobody owns. This argument makes no sense. A program/song/movie is a product being sold to you under certain terms. You can accept or reject. You are choosing to steal, and deluding yourself about it.
To say otherwise is to give someone else the power to restrict what I can do in my own home with my own property The program was never your property. Get this into your head -- the program is not your property until you buy it. Not steal it, but buy it. Plus your analogy fails. Your car is your property. Yet you cannot rollback it's odometer (for example). There are many other things that are illegal for you to do on/to your own property. This line of reasoning will get you nowhere.
If I feel like playing Doom, I'm not going to settle for Duke Nukem. If I need an OS to run some Windows applications, I'm not going to install Linux. Then agree to the terms, and buy Windows. Or disagree, and don't use that application. Those are your options. You have no god-given right to download windows for free and run it in
The odds of being sued for file sharing are ridiculously low, about the same as dying in an accidental fall. Frankly, downloading a torrent might be safer than driving to the store to buy a legal copy. That's not the point. The point is whether you recognize that you're ripping people off, and are on the wrong side of the law in every way.
the seller gets to impose his terms on everyone whether they choose to accept them or not Again, we covered this already. The law should protect against overreaching restrictions. And not accepting the terms means not buying the product -- so how will the seller impose their terms then?
I'm only asking them to mind their business and avoid restricting my rights No, you are not -- you stated multiple times that you think you are entitled to a free copy of the 'ordering of bits'. You want your rights protected, but you're happy to tread on theirs.
I have no right to demand that other people follow my model, you say, and in the next breath you let those same people demand that I follow their model by only exchanging information that they approve of? There you go again with your sense of entitlement. You have no right to access their product without paying what they ask. You can run your business by whatever model you choose. They will run theirs by whatever model they choose. You buy, or do not buy. You don't have any right to use their product without paying. How many different ways do you need this explained?
By making those "unpaid downloads" illegal, they're forcing their model on everyone. The law makes it illegal -- the publisher didn't need to do anything.
However, if you're selling discs with a different number burned onto them -- a number representing a copyrighted program, let's say -- then you do have a monopoly, and I'm not allowed to compete in the market for that particular product. You're the only supplier, so there's no competitive pressure on your prices. See how that works?
Do you even believe that yourself? You can compete -- you just have to write your own program that does the same thing, instead of copying mine. Thereby, you avoid violating my copyright. Then depending on who's program is better one of us will make more money. That my friend, is the purpose of copyright -- each of us gets to reap the rewards of our efforts -- and we cannot leech of each other's work.
From reading your comments, I don't think there's any chance we'll agree with each other any time soon. So let me just caution you that if you practice what you've been posting here, you might end up getting sued by someone (and you'll lose that case). i.e. you're ripping people off, and you need to at least be cautious so you don't get caught.
Um.. let me repeat the part of my comment that you quoted, this time with emphasis: "You could make the same complaint about any service." You can repeat it as much as you want -- you still have no right to demand a service if someone is trying to sell a product. The seller has terms, and you can accept or reject. Simple.
You can't take your car to a mechanic for repairs.... This is at least the fourth different analogy you've tried and it still fails. In the end, you got charged for parts and labor (which can be further broken down, but we'll keep it at that). Labor was the service, parts were the product. You paid the net cost -- not just for a service. You always have to look at net cost when pricing something. I really hope you don't live your life by the values you're displaying here, because you're just coming off as a super cheap person with an over-inflated sense of entitlement. Sorry to repeat that, but your arguments are just shocking.
Under the model I've proposed.... And you're free to conduct business under that model. You still have no right to demand that every other business do so. And you still have no right to help yourself to illegal, unpaid downloads of software and games.
I'll let the market work that out... It already did! There are many multitudes of business models in existance, and almost no industries have chosen the model you proposed. The market has already spoken.
The rest of them manage to do that without a monopoly, though. You keep confusing unrelated issues -- so far, pricing, restricting competition, and now monopoly. And who are the "rest of them"? We're talking copy-protection for crying out loud. If Activision made COD4, only they should profit from it's sales, not some pirate (of course, distributors in the legal supply chain get a cut). Same with say Namco-Bandai and Ace Combat 6. Where the hell did monopoly come from in this?
Irrelevant! People have a right to not be treated like a criminal until proven otherwise. If the publishers can't come up with a better way, they need to come up with a better business model instead. Pause to think for a moment before you claim it to be irrelevant so emphatically. There are many other situations where you submit to checks without quite the same fuss. A few examples:
When you go through security checks at an airport (even without accounting for crazy post 9/11 levels of scrutiny
Swiping your card for entry to your office building
Having anti-theft devices attached to clothes, or in books so you can't leave a store without paying for them
Having the dude at Best Buy's exit ask to see your receipt on random occasions, to make sure you've paid for the stuff you're exiting with
Ultimately if the publishers aren't able to come up with a better way, that's still no excuse for theft.
You could make the same complaint about any service No, you can't. There's a humongous difference between seeing a finished product and deciding if you want it, vs. seeing a proposal, assuming all will work as claimed, and putting money down for it. Come to think of it, anytime people crave something different they'd have to go through reams of proposals instead of browsing through existing product -- because existing product can only be sold (given?) to people who funed the labor in your model!
You come up with a reasonable description of the service you want done, and you let him figure out the details. Define reasonable. Define it for a operating system, a game, a song and a movie. Will you describe the movie you want made (thereby ruining the suspense among other things) and then fund it? Or browse a description of movies you want made and then fund them?
No, it's just performing a service in exchange for money, the kind of thing millions (if not billions) of people do every day. Or selling a product in exchange for money. The kind of thing millions (if not billions) of people do every day. But that isn't what you suggested -- you suggested the direct funding of the labor of product development be undertaken by the people who want to buy the product -- a model that works for an incredibly small number of businesses (some housing and defence contracts work this way), and none of them are mass-market. And the reason for that, is the reams of specs that go into forming those contracts.
If no one is willing to pay for it... This model is just broken. I've already debunked it effectively. Reply to that post instead.
Nope, those laborers chose not to be paid for their labor when they left the "writing software" business and entered the "distributing copies" business. They didn't have a choice. You stole their product. They wanted to sell it to you for a certain price. You didn't want to pay the price, but felt you had some god-given right to use the product anyway, so you make an unauthorized copy -- they didn't participate in this action in any way -- you did, and your action amounts to theft.
The whole point of copyright is that by restricting the rights of anyone... Wow - wrong! Copyright gives the original creator (publisher) the right to be credited for their work. The pirate violates the copyright by taking that credit instead.
Again, the whole point of copy protection is to restrict competition That is emphatically not the point of copy-protection. It is a side-effect that can be achieved when applied to media (music, movies) but that's it. Consider two concrete cases:
If tomorrow the govt. said, any music DRM scheme must be licensed at x price to any company that want to license it. Boom! Now iTunes purchases will work with all music players -- copy protection acheived, competition-restriction defeated!
Now consider copy protection in something like Adobe Photoshop (or any appliction or game). This can only make the bar for pirates higher. It cannot restrict competition because it has absolutely no effect on competing products.
He ends up with exactly the same amount of money whether I buy a used copy or download a free one. Wrong again! More people want to hold on to hit games to play them again later, resulting in more sales (since there are less used copies available). Simple demand and supply. Otherwise everybody would just download the game for free, and the publisher never gets paid.
I'm not asking anyone to "bend over backwards" to provide me with anything, especially for free. You're doing much worse than that. You're suggesting nobody has a right to get paid for a product -- they can only ask to be paid for a service. You're exhibiting the most extreme cheapness and self-righteousness I've seen in a really long time.
All I'm asking is for them to mind their own damn business. And I'm asking for laws ensuring exactly that. While also ensuring sure that cheapos like you don't get a free ride.
I'll happily pay for some of that labor if it's something that interests me. Again, you don't have this god-given right to choose what you should pay (i.e. labor and distribution only). They have every right to make a profit, to chose their price point, business model, distribution method. For all your noise about publishers not being able to "rub two brain cells together to form a business model that's compatible" with your rights, you came up with an incredibly damaged buisness model yourself. And lastly -- even if there is a flaw in the business model - it still doesn't give you the right to steal their product!. You simply need to exercise your right to say "no, I don't want to buy it".
You can at least understand the "oh COME on" and "give me a break"s coming from the digg crowd when the AACS LA claimed that 09F9 was a number illegal to possess. What about the ridiculous concept of an illegal prime [wikipedia.org]? So is it that much of a stretch to extend that to copyright infringement?
Wow -- YES -- it's too much of a stretch!!! The 09F9 thing is dumb as rocks. The illegal prime thing is dumb as rocks. Your "Yes but they're just bits" argument, sadly, is also dumb as rocks.
Those bits are the culmination of some entities efforts and they want to sell them to you for a price. If the price is fair, and you want the bits, buy them. If not, don't. If you take the bits by any means without paying the asked price, you are stealing them.
Your whole paragraph about electrical signals is terribly flawed. I'll get to the core of it:
So how absurd does it sound to suggest an illegal combination of electrical signals? Not even the slightest, itty little bit absurd!
The power you draw from the mains to power your computer in the very first place is an example of a very well defined pattern of an electrical signal. We know the specification of this pattern in very precise detail. But do you think you have a god-given right to tap into (just for example) your neighbour's power line, and 'replicate' that pattern?
In one case the 'pattern' represented an energy investment made by some entity. In the other case the 'pattern' represents some knowledge work done by some entity. Either way, they are within thier rights to charge you for it, and you are stealing if you 'copy' it without paying them.
Similar case -- if ford designs an amazing car that is the most amazing car ever made. Can chrysler make an exact copy of that car and sell it legally? No -- in this case chrysler are the pirate. It doesn't matter that replication is the real cost here -- the design belongs to ford, and ford alone.
I mentioned the fact that campaign contributions don't come with any guarantees to illustrate that people are willing to spend money even on a gamble, and thus they should be even more willing to spend money when they know what it is they're getting.
This is such an incredibly damaged argument. Can you even imagine the reams of specs you'd have to go through to know exactly what sort of product you are signing up to fund? I can just see the conversations:
"Well, we said you'd get a car, right? You guys never mentioned you wanted cup-holders in it. What was that -- you wanted xenon HIDs? Oh and a lightweight magnesium-alloy gearbox instead of a slushbox?
Now translate that to the specs that go into a game or an application (or a game with an API for extensions) and so on and so forth. Get real dude - do you actually beleive in that solution yourself?
In fact, what if the game is completed underbudget and is such mindblowing success that even without any copy-protection it generates 10x profits when sold on a per-copy basis. Does the publisher need to share the profit with the contributors? Do they get to keep the under-budget delta?
What you described sounds like some sort of venture capitalism -- but the interest there isn't in buying the product later. It's in developing a business that can then be sold. And it requires shit loads of research, and time, and money.
With copy-protection it's just too easy for the publishers to rip off people. I believe I addressed that. copy-protection protects the publisher's rights. Laws governing what copy-protection can and cannot do must protect ours. The absense of copy protection protects our rights, at the cost of the publisher's rights.
"Validation" (less dishonestly, canceling invalidation) is just guilty until proven innocent. You just defended the "treating us like criminals" argument with the "treating us like criminals" argument -- it doesn't work that way:)
The vast majority of piracy is done by people who are time rich and money poor and don't affect sales much at all, particularly when the free advertising is taken into account.
Yes, many publishers get a bee in their bonnet about people who use a copy of their product without paying, ignoring the fact that most never would've bought the product anyway. So what? This argument gets tossed out a lot -- where's the data defending it? There's absolutely no thought about price points etc. It's an interesting thought -- and the model might work for some -- but there's absolutely no evidence that this solution will work for all products that can be digitally distributed. That includes movies, applications, OSes, game disks etc. -- you have a point, but it's a theory at best -- nothing more.
"Hi, we're designing a game.... I suggest you try it. In the world we live in, people are trying to avoid paying for software/games that already exist - let alone ones that don't exist yet.
Oh, is it? If you buy a suit to wear to an interview.... He got paid when I bought the suit. Risk and reward, remember?
Depends - did he "steal" a copy of that car.... You are again attempting to dis-associate the cost of production and cost of design. In the car example, the production (copy) cost is high and design cost is relatively low. In software, design cost is high and production cost is very low. You still have to add them togeter to come up with a net cost of goods.
The amount of labor that went into the game is exactly the same... But the pirate illegally pocketed the money instead of paying the laborers. That's theft. No matter how you twist it, that's theft.
Only because his (publisher's) plan for making a buck involves restricting my rights Which is why I said, we need laws to prevent copy-restrictions from doing that.
...rather than by restricting competition... Copy protection should not restrict competition. Current DRM-schemes (for example iTunes, WM-DRM) do indeed restrict competition. They should not, by law be allowed to do that. Now do you understand the sort of laws I'm talking about? Ones that mandate interoperability guidelines, for example?
But it represents the same loss of revenue, doesn't it? No, it doesn't. As you said, the original owner now no longer has a copy of the game. If the game is so awesome that you want to keep playing it forever, you have to be willing to forego your $25 trade-in fee. In your 'better' world the publisher does not get rewarded for making such an awesome game -- in other words, it deprives the publisher of their just rewards.
I think you've got it backwards. Copyright does enforce a business model -- the model of doing the work first for free, and selling copies later -- and it does that by restricting our rights.
At the risk of turning this into a flamewar, I suggest that you have a misplaced sense of entitlement. You feel the whole business world should bend over backwards to provide everything to you for free, unless they can find some way of providing you an add-on service that you absolutely can't circumvent. This is utterly irrational on your part.
You have rights, but so do publishers. A solution is necessary that protects both your rights and theirs. Zero-DRM protects our rights at their cost. DRM allowed to roam free, protects their rights at the cost of ours. DRM, with proper legislative oversight/guidelines can protect the rights of both parties. The DRM exists; the legistation does not -- and the courts or government need to desperately step in and do something about it. I can't believe you have a problem understanding this.
That's because shareware is usually in that lovely sub-$10 sweet-spot where it's not worth the time/effort/risk to find a crack, hope it works the same as the legal version, pray you don't get infected with trojans etc.
This same argument won't hold up for games, applications etc. where the cost of the product is way higher (increasing the incentive for piracy)
The point is that the data is infinite in nature because you can copy it for free. So therefore trying to stop the copying is an exercise in futility. Perhaps true for a low-cost, high-volume product like music mp3s, but not true for others like games, applications etc.
Therefore instead of offering the game for a charge they should offer the service of hosting online games at a charge or the service of tracking stats online as a charge or whatever they want to offer a service of.
What if there simply isn't a corresponding service to sell?
What if the service is provided by some other entity under non-favorable revenue sharing terms?
What if the cost of the service is negligible to the cost of developing the actual prodcut
What if the service is easy to duplicate and therefor the 'service revenue' can be poached
What if the consumer simply perfers a single up-front cost instead of a monthly or annual fee?
Yes, it won't be as profitable up front but it will be MORE profitable over time.
You simply don't have any data to back up that conclusion (not to mention the logical flaws that I pointed out above)
In any case, if your argument made sense (which it doesn't), it means you are advocating higher costs for consumers
Bottom line -- service-oriented revenue models make sense in many many cases. That doesn't mean they are the solution to everything, and they certainly are not the solution to piracy.
Making copies isn't the hard part; designing the game in the first place is. But they'd rather charge for copies than for the labor of game design How do you suggest they charge for "the labor of game design"?
probably because they want to "strike it rich" if the game becomes a runaway hit. Which is completely fair. They made a runaway hit. Getting rich is their reward (and one of their incentives to make said runaway hit in the first place).
If only the rest of us got that luxury! We do! It's called risk and reward. They risked the capital, developed a product, and reaped the rewards. If the game is a complete flop, who do you think ends up making a loss? Risk and reward my friend. You are free to take a risk and reap the rewards if it pays off. If you wanna cut hair or be a regular salaried employee (which most of us are) your rewards are commensurate with the amount of risk you took - i.e. not much.
And we are still entitled to think that what they're providing isn't worth $10, and find someone else who'll provide it for less - whether that's a used game store or a torrent. "find someone else who'll provide it for less" -- interesting choice of words. If somebody steals a $20,000 car and 'provides' it to me for $2,000 do you suggest I buy it? Recognize your 'provider' for what he is -- a theif. Of someone else's labor. His risk (and effort) is non-existant, but his reward is sky-high. Yet you seem eager to punish the publisher for wanting to make a buck. A used-game store is a perfectly legal option for many reaons -- without going into them here, its pretty naive of you to club them in with the pirates thinking it gives your argument any weight - it doesn't.
But would it really be worth passing a bunch of laws enforcing those business models? The laws I mentioned/suggested aren't supposed to enforce the business model. They're supposed to enforce our rights. The DRM enforces the business model. The laws should protect us from the enforcement overreaching it's purpose as most DRM-schemes currently do.
Information is copyable, and water is a liquid above 32 F: these are facts of life. Murder is possible but illegal. I can shoplift - but it's illegal. A lot of things that are doable, are illegal. Add that to your facts of life.
That's exactly my point Well, then your point makes no sense. I'll elaborate:
the most fair price for the consumer is free How so? Free is the most desirable but not the most fair. In fact, why not ask to be paid for purchasing the product instead? If a publisher wants to sell s/w on a per-copy basis, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. 'Free' might be a possible/desirable (or even fair) price in some situations, but the blanket statement that "the most fair price for the consumer is free" is absolutely untrue.
unless the product is an actual service that costs actual money that pirates can't possibly come up with This suggests that consumers have a right to use any product they see fit, unless there is a service bundled with it (and that too, one that can't be copied by pirates). This is a complete logical fallacy. Consumer rights are important but this isn't one of them. We do have the right to simply not buy something if we can't stomach the price. We do not have a right to pirate stuff (copy bits) if the legal price is disagreeable to us.
instead of just secret data that costs nothing to copy Are you suggesting that publishers are just selling you some random bits that magically arranged themselves? There was a certain expense in getting the bits ordered the way they are, to make them acheive the task they do, you know.
They do that all the time, and it's still cracked and released. Publishers are starting to realize that they're spending too much money/time/effort on copy protection, and are moving to a non-DRM mindset
Different solutions will work for different products/services on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, the publisher will decided that the cost of constantly upgrading their copy-protection to make sure the latest cracks don't work anymore is worth the added revenue it generates.
My point is not to defend DRM -- I am with the/. crowd in hating it. My point is, it's easy to see why it exists when you pause to consider the 'other' side's perspective, and that's why it's unlikely to ever go away completely. Now that being the case, it's important for the courts or the govt. to step in and define our rights clearly so that companies don't trample on our rights while trying to protect theirs.
If your development cost was 10 million dollars, and you sold 10 million copies, you would have to charge at least $10 per disk to break even -- simple math. Oh the irony!! I meant to say 1 million copies.. so much for simple math:)
And it's not easy to goto a torrent site and grab the content which doesn't have this protection, generally before the legit content is even out on shelves? You're right, that's pretty easy, but don't you think publishers would respond to that with even stronger copy-protection instead of removing it altogether?
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you presume you're entitled to tell me not to download it. No, you presume you're entitled to download it without paying me.
Sharing information is free speech. And stealing a product is still theft. You want free speech -- go record your own song instead of stealing mine.
I owe the power company for the service of pushing electrons through a wire, not for the information contained in the waveform. Whatever dude -- you paid for a pattern. You can be pedantic about it in one context but see the bigger picture in another. Real convenient.
The words in a book are a pattern, yes, just like software. And that means they aren't property either. I recommend you try to walk out of Barnes and Noble with your next book -- but just pay them the actual cost of the paper and printing -- 5 cents (perhaps less). After all, the words are not property in your universe..
Oh, so now you agree that I have the right to burn whatever sequence of bits to a disc I want, regardless of whether any third party gives me permission? After all, that only involves my property, not theirs, and certainly doesn't involve any kind of sale. Correct -- just don't download stuff illegally. What part of that didn't you get? I even specifically called it out when I said you should be able to burn limitless copies of the songs (and by extension games, applications) you own -- your 'fair use' needs to be protected. (yes, yours too, much as it disgusts me). You still don't have the right to download stuff illegally. And you can't sell these limitless burned copies without the express consent of the copyright holder. There see? Both party's rights get protected. Neither party's rights are absolute.
Right, but they obviously do have a monopoly in the particular OS known as "Windows". No one else is allowed to sell a disc containing the same number that's on a Windows disc. When only one firm is allowed to sell a certain product, that's a monopoly no matter how you dress it up. Oh good greif. You know what? Just to make some headway, I'll concede this point to you. After all, going by the dictionary definition of monopoly, there is the exclusive 'right' to do something. But in all fairness the original context in which monopoly was brought up was an economic one -- and there monopoly is measured over markets. Plus, even for the exclusivity point, so what? The vendor has rights. Exclusive or otherwise. They created the product -- they have the exclusive right to profit from it -- simple.
- The labels have every right to do that for their songs
- They might price themselves out of the market that way -- but it's their own fault.
- They might alienate customers that way -- but it's their own fault.
- You still have no right to steal from them.
- Allofmp3.com still has no right to sell the songs without authorization
- However unpopular the labels might be, they are still forwarding a tiny sliver of the money back to the artists, unlike Allofmp3 that just gets fat.
Well, no. Like I've been saying, they can choose to get paid for making art instead of for making copies, and then they won't have to worry about who's downloading free copies, because they will have already been paid for the time they put into making it. And like I've been saying, you are free to sell your own songs that way if you want, but you have no right to insist that all other artists in the world do that, and you certainly have no right to rip them off by downloading free copies of their songs, unless they said it was ok.Claiming that it still "violates your rights" presumes that you're somehow entitled to tell other people what they can or can't download Not at all -- just that you owe me money for my song.
Again, you presume that you have the right to tell me what I can or can't listen to in the first place. Listen to anything you want -- nobody cares. Just pay me for my song instead of stealing from me.
Ah, I see. You don't believe in a right to free expression and communication. You'll tolerate other people's speech, as long as it doesn't interfere with your bottom line. Is that about right? No, it's completely wrong. Did you just equate piracy with free speech?!? All because you're too cheap to pay me for my song?
The program isn't anyone's property. It's a sequence of bits, a number, a pattern. So is the power in your mains - an AC signal of known amplitude and frequency. You still owe the power company for that pattern. So are the words in a book - just a pattern of charachters. Your argument is hollow -- the program is property.
The computer, however, is undoubtedly my property. Copyright means giving third parties veto power over what I'm allowed to do with that property. No, it only gives them the right to set terms on the sale of their property.
So then, we agree that copyright gives Microsoft a monopoly on Windows? Glad that's cleared up. That makes no sense whatsoever. MS makes an OS called Windows. Windows may or may not have a monopoly in OSes. You are free to make your own OS and compete with MS. Windows is MS's property to sell under the terms it sees fit. Call it anything you want, but your options are simply to buy or do not buy. Using without buying is piracy.
There's no doubting that you need to price your products correctly, but simply stating that volume compensates for lower prices is oversimplifying, and doesn't have any data to stand on, don't you agree? I mean, if you propose lowering the price of games from $50 to $10, you need to increase sales by 500% to compensate!
And even then, as $10 becomes the norm people will start complaining that it's too high, and maybe if the game cost $2 then nobody will pirate it, and the publishers can make up the difference in volume, etc.
But cracks carry with them the risk of future updates not applying, missing functionality, trojans, etc.
Plus, copy-protection is an 80-20 approach like anything else. As long as you can make sure 80% (or some similarly high percentage) of your customer base actually paid for your product, you can recover some of your losses in pricing. It's an example of how people who indulge in piracy actually make the honest ones pay more -- another reason I find some of the arguments on this thread so specious.
Wow.. I just noticed this in your post:
Competition would mean I can buy a song for 10 cents from AllOfMP3 instead of for $1 from iTunes, and competitive pressure would eventually push the price down to just above zero (since that's the marginal cost of a copy).If AllOfMP3 were forwarding a cut of the profits to the artists, and have prior written consent, then and only then are they authorized to actually sell the songs. Until then they're getting fat off the work done by the artists. They're even worse than the music labels because none of that money makes it back to the artists -- it only goes into a pirates pocket.
Competition my ass. This would just mean that artists have a choice between starvation and an alternate career choice.
Right -- makes sense. And if you use say, Linux instead of Windows for the same reason, that would make sense too. And only buying non-DRM'd music for that reason makes sense too. That's a principled approach and I respect that.
If you check the thread, along the way, posters are trying to use "being treated like a criminal" as an excuse to justify piracy. That's what I have a problem with. i.e. they can't say "I hate that WGA treats me like a criminal, therefor I shall pirate windows". Or "I hate that iTunes treats me like a criminal, therefore I'll download songs from limewire".
- I created a song, therefore I automatically have a copyright on it
- I can offer to sell you an MP3 of the song for $1 if I wish
- You can accept or reject this offer
- If you don't like the price, you still can't download the song for free -- that violates my rights
- You might still try to do that, so I might use DRM to protect my rights
- The DRM might restrict you to burning to a CD only 5 times, violating your rights. The law should disallow this.
- The DRM scheme might be proprietary, not licensed under favorable terms, limiting compatibility and consumer choice. The law should disallow this.
- The DRM might prevent you from re-selling the song (like selling a CD you no longer listen to). The law should disallow this (i.e. you should be able to re-sell it)
- If you re-sell the song to someone, your copy of it should no longer work. The DRM scheme can be used to enforce that, again, preventing you from violating my rights
- Generaically speaking, the DRM scheme might place xyz restriction on you (overreaching - trampling on your rights) - the law should disallow this.
- Bottom line: You have rights (fair-use rights). The law needs to identify them clearly, and state that any DRM scheme must honor them. That's how both our rights get enforced. No DRM scheme in existence does that, and that's why we need these laws.
I'm only entitled to a free copy if someone is willing to give me one. Let me correct that for you: You're only entitled to a free copy if the copyright holder is willing to give you one.It's asking them to stop treading on my rights and the rights of anyone who chooses to offer me a free copy. You never had the right to get a free copy from 'anyone who chooses to offer' it. This 'anyone who chooses to offer it' never had the right to offer it to you for free, unless they have the express, written consent of the copyright holder. This is the fundamental sense of entitlement you seem to have where you're conferring upon yourself rights that you simply don't have.
A program is a number, which no one owns; and if I happen to know that number, I'm entitled to input it into my computer, which I own. A dollar note is just a pattern that no one owns. A car is a particular grouping of molecules that no one owns. A painting is a grouping of colors that nobody owns. A book is a grouping of words that nobody owns. This argument makes no sense. A program/song/movie is a product being sold to you under certain terms. You can accept or reject. You are choosing to steal, and deluding yourself about it.
To say otherwise is to give someone else the power to restrict what I can do in my own home with my own property The program was never your property. Get this into your head -- the program is not your property until you buy it. Not steal it, but buy it. Plus your analogy fails. Your car is your property. Yet you cannot rollback it's odometer (for example). There are many other things that are illegal for you to do on/to your own property. This line of reasoning will get you nowhere.
If I feel like playing Doom, I'm not going to settle for Duke Nukem. If I need an OS to run some Windows applications, I'm not going to install Linux. Then agree to the terms, and buy Windows. Or disagree, and don't use that application. Those are your options. You have no god-given right to download windows for free and run it in
The odds of being sued for file sharing are ridiculously low, about the same as dying in an accidental fall. Frankly, downloading a torrent might be safer than driving to the store to buy a legal copy. That's not the point. The point is whether you recognize that you're ripping people off, and are on the wrong side of the law in every way.
Do you even believe that yourself? You can compete -- you just have to write your own program that does the same thing, instead of copying mine. Thereby, you avoid violating my copyright. Then depending on who's program is better one of us will make more money. That my friend, is the purpose of copyright -- each of us gets to reap the rewards of our efforts -- and we cannot leech of each other's work.
From reading your comments, I don't think there's any chance we'll agree with each other any time soon. So let me just caution you that if you practice what you've been posting here, you might end up getting sued by someone (and you'll lose that case). i.e. you're ripping people off, and you need to at least be cautious so you don't get caught.
Ultimately if the publishers aren't able to come up with a better way, that's still no excuse for theft.
- If tomorrow the govt. said, any music DRM scheme must be licensed at x price to any company that want to license it. Boom! Now iTunes purchases will work with all music players -- copy protection acheived, competition-restriction defeated!
- Now consider copy protection in something like Adobe Photoshop (or any appliction or game). This can only make the bar for pirates higher. It cannot restrict competition because it has absolutely no effect on competing products.
He ends up with exactly the same amount of money whether I buy a used copy or download a free one. Wrong again! More people want to hold on to hit games to play them again later, resulting in more sales (since there are less used copies available). Simple demand and supply. Otherwise everybody would just download the game for free, and the publisher never gets paid. I'm not asking anyone to "bend over backwards" to provide me with anything, especially for free. You're doing much worse than that. You're suggesting nobody has a right to get paid for a product -- they can only ask to be paid for a service. You're exhibiting the most extreme cheapness and self-righteousness I've seen in a really long time. All I'm asking is for them to mind their own damn business. And I'm asking for laws ensuring exactly that. While also ensuring sure that cheapos like you don't get a free ride. I'll happily pay for some of that labor if it's something that interests me. Again, you don't have this god-given right to choose what you should pay (i.e. labor and distribution only). They have every right to make a profit, to chose their price point, business model, distribution method. For all your noise about publishers not being able to "rub two brain cells together to form a business model that's compatible" with your rights, you came up with an incredibly damaged buisness model yourself. And lastly -- even if there is a flaw in the business model - it still doesn't give you the right to steal their product!. You simply need to exercise your right to say "no, I don't want to buy it".Wow -- YES -- it's too much of a stretch!!! The 09F9 thing is dumb as rocks. The illegal prime thing is dumb as rocks. Your "Yes but they're just bits" argument, sadly, is also dumb as rocks.
Those bits are the culmination of some entities efforts and they want to sell them to you for a price. If the price is fair, and you want the bits, buy them. If not, don't. If you take the bits by any means without paying the asked price, you are stealing them.
Your whole paragraph about electrical signals is terribly flawed. I'll get to the core of it:
So how absurd does it sound to suggest an illegal combination of electrical signals? Not even the slightest, itty little bit absurd!The power you draw from the mains to power your computer in the very first place is an example of a very well defined pattern of an electrical signal. We know the specification of this pattern in very precise detail. But do you think you have a god-given right to tap into (just for example) your neighbour's power line, and 'replicate' that pattern?
In one case the 'pattern' represented an energy investment made by some entity. In the other case the 'pattern' represents some knowledge work done by some entity. Either way, they are within thier rights to charge you for it, and you are stealing if you 'copy' it without paying them.
Similar case -- if ford designs an amazing car that is the most amazing car ever made. Can chrysler make an exact copy of that car and sell it legally? No -- in this case chrysler are the pirate. It doesn't matter that replication is the real cost here -- the design belongs to ford, and ford alone.
This is such an incredibly damaged argument. Can you even imagine the reams of specs you'd have to go through to know exactly what sort of product you are signing up to fund? I can just see the conversations:
"Well, we said you'd get a car, right? You guys never mentioned you wanted cup-holders in it. What was that -- you wanted xenon HIDs? Oh and a lightweight magnesium-alloy gearbox instead of a slushbox?
Now translate that to the specs that go into a game or an application (or a game with an API for extensions) and so on and so forth. Get real dude - do you actually beleive in that solution yourself?
In fact, what if the game is completed underbudget and is such mindblowing success that even without any copy-protection it generates 10x profits when sold on a per-copy basis. Does the publisher need to share the profit with the contributors? Do they get to keep the under-budget delta?
What you described sounds like some sort of venture capitalism -- but the interest there isn't in buying the product later. It's in developing a business that can then be sold. And it requires shit loads of research, and time, and money.
...rather than by restricting competition... Copy protection should not restrict competition. Current DRM-schemes (for example iTunes, WM-DRM) do indeed restrict competition. They should not, by law be allowed to do that. Now do you understand the sort of laws I'm talking about? Ones that mandate interoperability guidelines, for example? But it represents the same loss of revenue, doesn't it? No, it doesn't. As you said, the original owner now no longer has a copy of the game. If the game is so awesome that you want to keep playing it forever, you have to be willing to forego your $25 trade-in fee. In your 'better' world the publisher does not get rewarded for making such an awesome game -- in other words, it deprives the publisher of their just rewards. I think you've got it backwards. Copyright does enforce a business model -- the model of doing the work first for free, and selling copies later -- and it does that by restricting our rights.At the risk of turning this into a flamewar, I suggest that you have a misplaced sense of entitlement. You feel the whole business world should bend over backwards to provide everything to you for free, unless they can find some way of providing you an add-on service that you absolutely can't circumvent. This is utterly irrational on your part.
You have rights, but so do publishers. A solution is necessary that protects both your rights and theirs. Zero-DRM protects our rights at their cost. DRM allowed to roam free, protects their rights at the cost of ours. DRM, with proper legislative oversight/guidelines can protect the rights of both parties. The DRM exists; the legistation does not -- and the courts or government need to desperately step in and do something about it. I can't believe you have a problem understanding this.
That's because shareware is usually in that lovely sub-$10 sweet-spot where it's not worth the time/effort/risk to find a crack, hope it works the same as the legal version, pray you don't get infected with trojans etc.
This same argument won't hold up for games, applications etc. where the cost of the product is way higher (increasing the incentive for piracy)
- What if there simply isn't a corresponding service to sell?
- What if the service is provided by some other entity under non-favorable revenue sharing terms?
- What if the cost of the service is negligible to the cost of developing the actual prodcut
- What if the service is easy to duplicate and therefor the 'service revenue' can be poached
- What if the consumer simply perfers a single up-front cost instead of a monthly or annual fee?
Yes, it won't be as profitable up front but it will be MORE profitable over time.Bottom line -- service-oriented revenue models make sense in many many cases. That doesn't mean they are the solution to everything, and they certainly are not the solution to piracy.
Different solutions will work for different products/services on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, the publisher will decided that the cost of constantly upgrading their copy-protection to make sure the latest cracks don't work anymore is worth the added revenue it generates.
My point is not to defend DRM -- I am with the /. crowd in hating it. My point is, it's easy to see why it exists when you pause to consider the 'other' side's perspective, and that's why it's unlikely to ever go away completely. Now that being the case, it's important for the courts or the govt. to step in and define our rights clearly so that companies don't trample on our rights while trying to protect theirs.