How dare people drink their tap water! After all, how are bottled water companies expected to turn a profit when people can just turn a knob on their faucet and get water on their own?
There should not be "sites" to shut down; the Internet was designed to be P2P and should be P2P. Unfortunately, we failed to develop P2P networking to the same extent that we developed the web, so now we are vulnerable to this sort of thing.
copyright going obsolete is more because society increasingly ignores copyright
Before the era of computer networks individual citizens rarely gave a moment's thought to copyrights, anymore than they gave a moment's thought to regulations on cement mixtures, railroad electrical systems, plastic manufacturing, etc. Nobody thinks about industrial regulations beyond those that affect whatever industry they are employed in, so people who were not working for publishers, record companies, broadcasters, etc. simply never thought about copyrights, because copyrights had nothing to do with them.
These days, copying does not require specialized industrial equipment; a typical PC is sufficient to copy books, music, and movies. It is not that PC owners increasingly ignore copyright; people have always ignored copyrights, but before computer networks that made no difference (well, to be fair, the problems really started with tape recorders). The recording, publishing, and movie industries were economically viable because copying equipment was scarce, and in the 21st century it is not scarce and so the industries no longer have any real economic reason to exist.
OK, you're 14 now, it is time for us to talk about a few things. If you have sex with someone, use a condom, and make sure you do not sign their public key unless you really trust them.
That's why you choose "conference papers from the 1970s" as your example,
I chose that example because:
They are relevant to the modern world
They are not nearly as easy to obtain as papers that have been posted on their authors' websites
They are still "owned" and thus I cannot just get them, scan them, and make them available to the rest of the world.
These papers are not even lost to history -- they are buried in university archives, unavailable online. It seems, however, that you have a different concept of owning a published paper than the people who hold the copyrights on those papers.
It's as intellectually dishonest an argument as possible, because it deliberately couches your position in terms that make it appear as though scanning and uploading essentially abandoned works, and scanning and uploading currently-published and actively-promoted works by living authors who make their living from their books are morally equivalent acts. They're not.
Please, many of the people who wrote and published those papers in the 70s are still alive. I wonder what time scale you would prefer. Something a little more current? How about scanning a book within a few minutes of its release in the United States, so that poor people in South America can have access to it? No? We are not allowed to ever paint copyright infringement in a positive light?
There are plenty of books, music, movies, and software that are simply not being made available by the people who hold copyrights on them, except in select places in the world, or in some cases not being made available anywhere. For people living in those places, those works might as well be lost to history. Yet you are quick to make an exception for out-of-print books; I wonder what your moral justification for that is:
To scan and upload a book that is no longer in publication...whose nuturing and promotion has been abandoned by everyone with a claim to its copyright is one thing - and something of a special case.
Or in other words, "Yeah, violating intellectual property rights is OK sometimes, you know, like when people exercise their rights in a way I do not agree with."
I didn't bother to cite the Copyright Clause, because it's non-germane. The question at hand is the validity of the concept of intellectual property, not the existence of copyright law, or the Constitutional authority therefor.
Oh, the constitution is irrelevant now, even though it is the basis for the copyright / patent / trademark laws in this country. You are starting from the premise that "intellectual property rights" are "natural rights" like the right to live; not only is not universally agreed upon, it is not even in agreement with the very people who created such rights in this country. Yes, created those rights, because without a legal framework those rights do not exist at all -- which is not true of natural rights (nobody "created" your right to live; you were born with it).
In reality, "intellectual property rights" are a myth designed to make people forget that we created the copyright/patent/trademark systems for a reason: to benefit everyone. You were not born with the right to tell people they are not allowed to make copies of the books you write, that right was conferred to you by the law, in an effort to establish a system whereby the public would have access to books (etc.). There was no concept of "intellectual property" before such systems were created; at one time, anyone could simply copy books or retell stories (compare to the right to live, which has existed in one form or another for as long as we have historical records -- every society protected the right of at least some of its members to live).
That it has not yet been recognized as a natural right by the non-creative majority doesn't matter, because, as I po
It might be natural evolution a lion eating you... but that doesn't mean we should let it happen
What do you suggest, killing all the predators in the world? Where I live now we are overrun with deer because people thought it was a good idea to drive the wolves and mountain lions out of this region. Deer hunting is now viewed as a form of population management.
lets say people are getting robbed on the park. What is your advice? Don't go to the park?
We send the police to the park to protect people. Do you want to have police officers in your home, making sure you do not commit copyright infringement? I suppose borrowing the North Korean approach to Internet access is the next logical step from borrowing the Chinese.
It's easy to say that walking on the streets doesn't cope with our modern world anymore.
Except that nothing has changed in the past 40 centuries. City streets have always been dangerous, and we have always had police officers / soldiers / law enforcers patrolling our streets. This is done to increase the freedom of people living in cities, unlike SOPA/DMCA/etc. which are designed to curtail your freedom.
The fact that people can break DRM easily doesn't mean that every piece of software should be given away for free and that there should be no punishment for people illegally profiting from other people work.
Yes, how terrible it is to profit from other people's work...
You think that is not their goal? The end game here is to turn the Internet into a fancy cable TV system, where the leaf nodes cannot communicate with each other.
I don't. I want an environment where people are free to choose how they want to engage in business. Some people choose the Red Hat model. Other people choose to sell their software.
People can run their businesses however they want...except that if you base your business on selling copies of works that you own a copyright on, the government will help support your revenue stream in ways that it does not help other businesses. Even if there were no copyrights at all, you would still have the right to try to sell software, you just would not have a real expectation of profit (unless you add additional value to having a valid license, which is basically what Red Hat does).
For the most part, until the mid-70s copyrights were nothing more than a regulation on industry; that is why copyrights are designed to be used in court (where a judge can decide if "fair use" applies etc.), unlike regulations on parking cars, walking dogs, etc. From the 70s onward, it became common for people to own equipment that could be used to make near-perfect copies of copyrighted works -- tape recorders, PCs, and so forth. Unfortunately for copyright owners, when individual citizens are violating copyrights en masse, the court system cannot be expected to do anything about it -- any more than the court system could handle hearing every single case involving a parking violation.
The copyright industries have never relied on individual citizens' moral obligation to follow copyrights, because copyrights are matters for lawyers to handle and most people do not have a legal team working for them. Instead, those industries relied on their technical superiority -- they were the only people who had copying equipment, and they used copyrights to ensure that only the companies that invested in creating entertainment/etc. could make copies of it. Individual citizens did not make copies of books or music because they simply lacked the ability to do so, which was the basis of the entire business model. Now everyone has a computer; that old business no longer has a basis in reality, and instead of moving on, we are continuing to debate the best way to create an artificial basis for an out-of-date business.
Pirates break the supply and demand chain by saying "this is worth something to me (or else why bother downloading it), but I don't want to pay for it, and hey I can get away with that."
Nobody takes the time to think that, nor should they be expected to. Everyone has a computer in their home that can download music at high speed and low cost (basically no cost), and that is what they are going to do. Telling people not to download music or software is as effective as telling people not to have premarital sex. Either we need to kill the PC era off and turn the Internet into a cable TV system, or we need to accept that the world is different now.
by pirating, you rob them of their freedom to succeed (or fail) honestly.
Nobody robs anyone of anything. It is as easy to copy software as it is to breath; selling software is kind of like selling air. What basis does someone have for complaining that their "proprietary air" business was killed by people daring to breath on their own?
It might be an anachronistic business model, but you're not giving them the chance to find out honestly.
Sure we are: they tried to sell software, and nobody bothered to buy it, because they could just download copies at no cost. That is the lesson about the new world: you need to do more than just demand that people not make copies with their computers.
If I told you that I was going to sell water to people who have water faucets in their homes, would you think I was crazy? Sure you would -- why would anyone pay for bottled water when they can just turn a knob on their faucet and get water? Yet people do pay for bottled water, and it is not because they will be sued for us
Re:Why people want to KILL SOPA?
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Why should we feel sympathy for people whose business models failed to keep up to date with the modern world? Do you feel sympathy for stage coach drivers who lost their jobs thanks to railroads and automobiles? Do you feel sympathy for vacuum tube manufacturers?
People need to update their business models to cope with new technologies, plain and simple. It is absurd to expect a typical person to know or care about copyright law, and it is insane to introduce a censorship apparatus in America just to protect an old business model. If your business depends on people not using their own computers to do certain things then your business is basically doomed.
I guess I am expected to feel bad for the guy who spent late nights debugging his software only to see people download it without paying. Unfortunately for him, he made a risky business decision (basing his business on people not downloading software when software piracy has been a reality since the beginning of the PC age) which was practically guaranteed to backfire. Sometimes businesses just do not work -- why should we feel more sympathy for some classes of business than for others?
In terms of the economics of your operation, you were monetizing something scarce: the ability to burn CDs. Had everyone at your school had CD burners, I suspect that your business would have died pretty fast -- people would have just made copies for their friends and not bothered to pay you.
Of course, nobody would have shown any sympathy for your inability to sell "pirate" CDs. Yet we are expected to feel sympathy for the recording studios.
Re:Why people want to KILL SOPA?
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Better business model may eventually equate to a different way of making money may eventually equate to people just giving up and not producing.
I doubt that anyone will give up. At one time there were no copyrights on music, yet people still sang songs and created music instruments. At one time there were no copyrights on written works, but people still wrote books, to the point where huge libraries could be filled. Immensely complex and useful software is released under the terms of the GPL and other free software licenses, which encourage people to make copies with or without payment.
It is not a question of whether or not people will do creative work, it is a question of whether or not we have a system that ensures the public has access to creative works (which means more than simply ensuring that creative work is done -- what use is a painting that remains locked in a cellar somewhere?).
And yet look at how many utilities or applications come from tiny little companies
Look at how many software utilities are being given away at no cost, and look at how this company has made its way to the S&P 500 list by monetizing GPL'd software:
No, we "get it" just fine -- people like you want to make money by forbidding other people from using their computers / tape recorders / etc. in certain ways. At one time, that was nothing more than a regulation on industry, because nobody could make good copies of creative works without industrial equipment. Now everyone has the necessary equipment in their homes, but there is no way that an average American is going to take the time to ask whether or not they are violating a copyright or engaging in fair use, and it is absurd to think that a typical American will have the resources needed to dispute such things in court.
The point of SOPA is to attack, head-on, one of the greatest steps forward in communication in the history of the human race. Computers and the Internet are as important as writing and the printing press were. The Internet threatens the current distribution model and regulations, much in the same way that the printing press and the ability to write did, and just as happened then, people whose incomes depended on the previous distribution model found themselves facing the loss of their jobs.
At one time, laws, entertainment, and history were not written down, but passed down orally. Communities would have people whose job was to remember things and pass that knowledge on to future generations. One day, a new technology emerged: writing. Suddenly, instead of relying on people to remember laws and stories, societies were wage to record things. The old profession died, and new professions emerged: scribes and scholars. Had you been around back then, you would have been pushing for a law that restricted writing in order to protect your job as a storyteller, and you would have insisted that all the people who said that writing should not be restricted did not "get it."
Centuries after scribes established themselves as one of the most important classes in society, a new technology emerged that threatened their profession: printing presses. The same pattern emerged: scribes lost their jobs, and new professions developed. Had you lived back then, you would have demanded a law that restricted printing presses so that you could keep your job as a scribe.
So here we are, in the 21st century, and we see the same pattern once again. Centuries after the press became fundamental to society and we built laws and businesses around it, a new technology has emerged: computer networks. Now people do not need to wait for industrial printers to produce copies of books, they can just have a copy sent to them over a computer network. You do, in fact, live in this age, and you are pushing for la
Worse still, many of those consequences will not be felt for years after the bill (hypothetically) passes, but which point it will be too late to do anything.
Does anyone on/. need their awareness raised about SOPA?
Google could have done more, but as a matter of probability they are doing a good job -- if 1% of their users notice the big black rectangle over their logo, that amounts of millions of people who will be informed. I like Wikipedia's approach, although it is understandable that a business like Google cannot afford to shut down their operations for an entire day (especially when their competitors are not doing so -- even if Wikipedia were a business, what competitors can you think of?).
Actually I recently patented the replacement of commas with parentheses. Since you are clearly conspiring to violate my patent, the government will now shut down slashdot.
Re:Why people want to KILL SOPA?
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Hey, I am willing to discuss the issue -- the real issue, which is whether or not the benefit to the American public is being maximized by our current system. If we need to adopt the Chinese approach to the Internet just to keep the current system afloat then I think the answer is, "No, not even close."
We already have absurdly long copyright terms, the censorship of software that can be used to subvert DRM (and court-ordered censorship of magazines that dare to publish links to copies of that software), and a department of "homeland security" that hijacks DNS entries in the name of protecting copyrights and trademarks. All of that is not enough? If all that is not enough, then the system needs to be fundamentally redesigned. Copyrights/trademarks/patents/trade secrets are of much lower priority than the protection of American rights and freedoms.
I find it interesting that people want to kill PIPA and SOPA, and not change it to allow protection against piracy while still allowing people freedom to use the web
We have already given copyright, patent, and trademark owners tremendous power to fight those who violate copyrights/etc. I think the better answer is to ask whether or not the current system is actually benefiting the American public. It may be time to develop a completely new system for improving the public's access to creative works.
I have a game on the Android market. It has sold around 1000 copies... (it cost just 1 dollar so it's not a matter of cost). Some russian guy cracked my game and by looking on download counters I can tell the game was already illegaly downloaded more than 50000 times.
No offense, but you need to find a better business model. Take a look at a security engineering text (I recommend Andersen's) for more information on why DRM will always fail you in the end. There is no such thing as a secure device in an insecure environment, and software DRM is even more vulnerable.
You will find no sympathy from me. If DRM+absurdly long copyrights+the DMCA+DHS hijacking DNS records+all the other things we are doing are not enough to keep your revenue stream flowing, then you need to find a different way to make money.
If you made your living by creating music, art, or literature, I suspect you'd look at things very differently
...and if you made your living making hammers, you would think that nobody but you should be allowed to make hammers, and that for every nail a particular hammer is used on you should receive a royalty payment. Except that we all know that is absurd, right? After all, a hammer is not a story!
Please, what difference does it make whether or not I am an author, musician, or artist of any kind? Copyright law affects me, it affects the society I live in, and the decisions we make about copyrights today will affect future generations. I have every right to have an opinion on the subject, and I have every right to dismiss views that make no sense, such as this:
Saying, "Hey, you got your book published, so you have no right to complain if I scan a copy into PDF, Epub, or text format and upload it as a torrent," is sophistry of the most self-serving kind, and profoundly immoral.
Profoundly immoral? To scan a book and share it with the world? You have an interesting moral code. If you wanted to read books that were lost to history, I think your view would change. Try to find "full" versions of conference papers from the 1970s, then tell me how "immoral" it is for people to dare make copies of books.
The entire point of the copyright system is to improve the public's access to science and useful art. It is not to create a new form of property; in fact, copyright is vastly different from real property rights. Unlike real property rights, copyrights expire after some period of time (unless you can buy congressmen and get them to keep extending copyrights for you). The fact that a house was purchased in 1805 has no bearing on whether or not it can be inherited generation after generation; yet nobody can hold a copyright on a book published in 1805. The public domain is what separates copyrights from property rights.
You cannot justify stealing it, simply because it's intangible
Good thing an intangible idea cannot be stolen. I suppose I could remove the part of your brain where the idea is "stored" and implant that into my brain, but I think medical science needs a few more years -- and the continued available of published research papers and books to the people who build on those works -- before such a thing is possible. "Theft" implies thatthe person who owns the thing that was stolen no longer has access to it, not simply that they cannot monetize it.
If I build a big, ugly structure next to your property and drive down its real estate value, is that theft? Why, then, is violating a copyright or a patent "theft?" Right, it is not theft, it is just depriving you of an opportunity to monetize your creative work.
A baby doesn't understand the concept of right and wrong. Unfortunately, it appears that neither do you.
Insulting people is the way to win arguments on/., right? No, the only people who turn to insults are people whose arguments are so poorly grounded that they have no other choice.
I find it interesting that you did not bother to cite this part of the constitution, which forms the basis for our patent and copyright laws:
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I suppose you tried to avoid it because it neither mandates the copyright system and it clearly indicates that copyrights must only exist for limited periods of time. Perhaps if you had spent whatever time it took you to think up your insults reading the constitution, you would have spotted this...or maybe the constitution is not even relevant in your mind, because you think that copyrights are natural rights like life, liberty, and property (although as plenty of people have pointed out, none of those rights come with expiration dates).
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor?
That was the situation for centuries, and copyright was not introduced because of some moral imperative -- in England (whose laws served as the basis for American and Canadian laws), copyrights were introduced to improve the public's access to written works.
If you think there is a moral argument for allowing authors to continue to profit from their work decades after it was done, I would like to hear it. If I produce a hammer, will I receive payment for the use of that hammer decades after I produced it? Let's turn things around -- what makes authors so special?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not give them any ideas...
So let's go ahead and post a breakdown of your income to make sure that you made your money legitimately.
How dare people drink their tap water! After all, how are bottled water companies expected to turn a profit when people can just turn a knob on their faucet and get water on their own?
There should not be "sites" to shut down; the Internet was designed to be P2P and should be P2P. Unfortunately, we failed to develop P2P networking to the same extent that we developed the web, so now we are vulnerable to this sort of thing.
copyright going obsolete is more because society increasingly ignores copyright
Before the era of computer networks individual citizens rarely gave a moment's thought to copyrights, anymore than they gave a moment's thought to regulations on cement mixtures, railroad electrical systems, plastic manufacturing, etc. Nobody thinks about industrial regulations beyond those that affect whatever industry they are employed in, so people who were not working for publishers, record companies, broadcasters, etc. simply never thought about copyrights, because copyrights had nothing to do with them.
These days, copying does not require specialized industrial equipment; a typical PC is sufficient to copy books, music, and movies. It is not that PC owners increasingly ignore copyright; people have always ignored copyrights, but before computer networks that made no difference (well, to be fair, the problems really started with tape recorders). The recording, publishing, and movie industries were economically viable because copying equipment was scarce, and in the 21st century it is not scarce and so the industries no longer have any real economic reason to exist.
Why not combine the two into one grand talk?
OK, you're 14 now, it is time for us to talk about a few things. If you have sex with someone, use a condom, and make sure you do not sign their public key unless you really trust them.
If you're getting frisked, we're no longer talking about "law abiding citizens".
Tsk tsk...
Granted, they certainly could use this device to scan random people.
This is practically guaranteed to happen.
But that's an unconstitutional search which the Supreme Court would slap the Hell out of
http://www.tsa.gov/
That's why you choose "conference papers from the 1970s" as your example,
I chose that example because:
These papers are not even lost to history -- they are buried in university archives, unavailable online. It seems, however, that you have a different concept of owning a published paper than the people who hold the copyrights on those papers.
It's as intellectually dishonest an argument as possible, because it deliberately couches your position in terms that make it appear as though scanning and uploading essentially abandoned works, and scanning and uploading currently-published and actively-promoted works by living authors who make their living from their books are morally equivalent acts. They're not.
Please, many of the people who wrote and published those papers in the 70s are still alive. I wonder what time scale you would prefer. Something a little more current? How about scanning a book within a few minutes of its release in the United States, so that poor people in South America can have access to it? No? We are not allowed to ever paint copyright infringement in a positive light?
There are plenty of books, music, movies, and software that are simply not being made available by the people who hold copyrights on them, except in select places in the world, or in some cases not being made available anywhere. For people living in those places, those works might as well be lost to history. Yet you are quick to make an exception for out-of-print books; I wonder what your moral justification for that is:
To scan and upload a book that is no longer in publication...whose nuturing and promotion has been abandoned by everyone with a claim to its copyright is one thing - and something of a special case.
Or in other words, "Yeah, violating intellectual property rights is OK sometimes, you know, like when people exercise their rights in a way I do not agree with."
I didn't bother to cite the Copyright Clause, because it's non-germane. The question at hand is the validity of the concept of intellectual property, not the existence of copyright law, or the Constitutional authority therefor.
Oh, the constitution is irrelevant now, even though it is the basis for the copyright / patent / trademark laws in this country. You are starting from the premise that "intellectual property rights" are "natural rights" like the right to live; not only is not universally agreed upon, it is not even in agreement with the very people who created such rights in this country. Yes, created those rights, because without a legal framework those rights do not exist at all -- which is not true of natural rights (nobody "created" your right to live; you were born with it).
In reality, "intellectual property rights" are a myth designed to make people forget that we created the copyright/patent/trademark systems for a reason: to benefit everyone. You were not born with the right to tell people they are not allowed to make copies of the books you write, that right was conferred to you by the law, in an effort to establish a system whereby the public would have access to books (etc.). There was no concept of "intellectual property" before such systems were created; at one time, anyone could simply copy books or retell stories (compare to the right to live, which has existed in one form or another for as long as we have historical records -- every society protected the right of at least some of its members to live).
That it has not yet been recognized as a natural right by the non-creative majority doesn't matter, because, as I po
It might be natural evolution a lion eating you... but that doesn't mean we should let it happen
What do you suggest, killing all the predators in the world? Where I live now we are overrun with deer because people thought it was a good idea to drive the wolves and mountain lions out of this region. Deer hunting is now viewed as a form of population management.
lets say people are getting robbed on the park. What is your advice? Don't go to the park?
We send the police to the park to protect people. Do you want to have police officers in your home, making sure you do not commit copyright infringement? I suppose borrowing the North Korean approach to Internet access is the next logical step from borrowing the Chinese.
It's easy to say that walking on the streets doesn't cope with our modern world anymore.
Except that nothing has changed in the past 40 centuries. City streets have always been dangerous, and we have always had police officers / soldiers / law enforcers patrolling our streets. This is done to increase the freedom of people living in cities, unlike SOPA/DMCA/etc. which are designed to curtail your freedom.
The fact that people can break DRM easily doesn't mean that every piece of software should be given away for free and that there should be no punishment for people illegally profiting from other people work.
Yes, how terrible it is to profit from other people's work...
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto
I for one like the old business model of paying for an application... you will find out that free applications nowadays are very, very annoying
You are talking to someone who writes all his publications using LaTeX, with Emacs as a text editor, on a GNU/Linux OS. What was your point again?
basically... there should be ways to punish these "smart S's" who earn money from sharing other people works for free
Interesting business model...
You think that is not their goal? The end game here is to turn the Internet into a fancy cable TV system, where the leaf nodes cannot communicate with each other.
I don't. I want an environment where people are free to choose how they want to engage in business. Some people choose the Red Hat model. Other people choose to sell their software.
People can run their businesses however they want...except that if you base your business on selling copies of works that you own a copyright on, the government will help support your revenue stream in ways that it does not help other businesses. Even if there were no copyrights at all, you would still have the right to try to sell software, you just would not have a real expectation of profit (unless you add additional value to having a valid license, which is basically what Red Hat does).
For the most part, until the mid-70s copyrights were nothing more than a regulation on industry; that is why copyrights are designed to be used in court (where a judge can decide if "fair use" applies etc.), unlike regulations on parking cars, walking dogs, etc. From the 70s onward, it became common for people to own equipment that could be used to make near-perfect copies of copyrighted works -- tape recorders, PCs, and so forth. Unfortunately for copyright owners, when individual citizens are violating copyrights en masse, the court system cannot be expected to do anything about it -- any more than the court system could handle hearing every single case involving a parking violation.
The copyright industries have never relied on individual citizens' moral obligation to follow copyrights, because copyrights are matters for lawyers to handle and most people do not have a legal team working for them. Instead, those industries relied on their technical superiority -- they were the only people who had copying equipment, and they used copyrights to ensure that only the companies that invested in creating entertainment/etc. could make copies of it. Individual citizens did not make copies of books or music because they simply lacked the ability to do so, which was the basis of the entire business model. Now everyone has a computer; that old business no longer has a basis in reality, and instead of moving on, we are continuing to debate the best way to create an artificial basis for an out-of-date business.
Pirates break the supply and demand chain by saying "this is worth something to me (or else why bother downloading it), but I don't want to pay for it, and hey I can get away with that."
Nobody takes the time to think that, nor should they be expected to. Everyone has a computer in their home that can download music at high speed and low cost (basically no cost), and that is what they are going to do. Telling people not to download music or software is as effective as telling people not to have premarital sex. Either we need to kill the PC era off and turn the Internet into a cable TV system, or we need to accept that the world is different now.
by pirating, you rob them of their freedom to succeed (or fail) honestly.
Nobody robs anyone of anything. It is as easy to copy software as it is to breath; selling software is kind of like selling air. What basis does someone have for complaining that their "proprietary air" business was killed by people daring to breath on their own?
It might be an anachronistic business model, but you're not giving them the chance to find out honestly.
Sure we are: they tried to sell software, and nobody bothered to buy it, because they could just download copies at no cost. That is the lesson about the new world: you need to do more than just demand that people not make copies with their computers.
If I told you that I was going to sell water to people who have water faucets in their homes, would you think I was crazy? Sure you would -- why would anyone pay for bottled water when they can just turn a knob on their faucet and get water? Yet people do pay for bottled water, and it is not because they will be sued for us
Why should we feel sympathy for people whose business models failed to keep up to date with the modern world? Do you feel sympathy for stage coach drivers who lost their jobs thanks to railroads and automobiles? Do you feel sympathy for vacuum tube manufacturers?
People need to update their business models to cope with new technologies, plain and simple. It is absurd to expect a typical person to know or care about copyright law, and it is insane to introduce a censorship apparatus in America just to protect an old business model. If your business depends on people not using their own computers to do certain things then your business is basically doomed.
I guess I am expected to feel bad for the guy who spent late nights debugging his software only to see people download it without paying. Unfortunately for him, he made a risky business decision (basing his business on people not downloading software when software piracy has been a reality since the beginning of the PC age) which was practically guaranteed to backfire. Sometimes businesses just do not work -- why should we feel more sympathy for some classes of business than for others?
In terms of the economics of your operation, you were monetizing something scarce: the ability to burn CDs. Had everyone at your school had CD burners, I suspect that your business would have died pretty fast -- people would have just made copies for their friends and not bothered to pay you.
Of course, nobody would have shown any sympathy for your inability to sell "pirate" CDs. Yet we are expected to feel sympathy for the recording studios.
Better business model may eventually equate to a different way of making money may eventually equate to people just giving up and not producing.
I doubt that anyone will give up. At one time there were no copyrights on music, yet people still sang songs and created music instruments. At one time there were no copyrights on written works, but people still wrote books, to the point where huge libraries could be filled. Immensely complex and useful software is released under the terms of the GPL and other free software licenses, which encourage people to make copies with or without payment.
It is not a question of whether or not people will do creative work, it is a question of whether or not we have a system that ensures the public has access to creative works (which means more than simply ensuring that creative work is done -- what use is a painting that remains locked in a cellar somewhere?).
And yet look at how many utilities or applications come from tiny little companies
Look at how many software utilities are being given away at no cost, and look at how this company has made its way to the S&P 500 list by monetizing GPL'd software:
http://www.redhat.com/
People here will never get it,
No, we "get it" just fine -- people like you want to make money by forbidding other people from using their computers / tape recorders / etc. in certain ways. At one time, that was nothing more than a regulation on industry, because nobody could make good copies of creative works without industrial equipment. Now everyone has the necessary equipment in their homes, but there is no way that an average American is going to take the time to ask whether or not they are violating a copyright or engaging in fair use, and it is absurd to think that a typical American will have the resources needed to dispute such things in court.
The point of SOPA is to attack, head-on, one of the greatest steps forward in communication in the history of the human race. Computers and the Internet are as important as writing and the printing press were. The Internet threatens the current distribution model and regulations, much in the same way that the printing press and the ability to write did, and just as happened then, people whose incomes depended on the previous distribution model found themselves facing the loss of their jobs.
At one time, laws, entertainment, and history were not written down, but passed down orally. Communities would have people whose job was to remember things and pass that knowledge on to future generations. One day, a new technology emerged: writing. Suddenly, instead of relying on people to remember laws and stories, societies were wage to record things. The old profession died, and new professions emerged: scribes and scholars. Had you been around back then, you would have been pushing for a law that restricted writing in order to protect your job as a storyteller, and you would have insisted that all the people who said that writing should not be restricted did not "get it."
Centuries after scribes established themselves as one of the most important classes in society, a new technology emerged that threatened their profession: printing presses. The same pattern emerged: scribes lost their jobs, and new professions developed. Had you lived back then, you would have demanded a law that restricted printing presses so that you could keep your job as a scribe.
So here we are, in the 21st century, and we see the same pattern once again. Centuries after the press became fundamental to society and we built laws and businesses around it, a new technology has emerged: computer networks. Now people do not need to wait for industrial printers to produce copies of books, they can just have a copy sent to them over a computer network. You do, in fact, live in this age, and you are pushing for la
SOPA would have many unintended consequences.
Worse still, many of those consequences will not be felt for years after the bill (hypothetically) passes, but which point it will be too late to do anything.
Does anyone on /. need their awareness raised about SOPA?
Google could have done more, but as a matter of probability they are doing a good job -- if 1% of their users notice the big black rectangle over their logo, that amounts of millions of people who will be informed. I like Wikipedia's approach, although it is understandable that a business like Google cannot afford to shut down their operations for an entire day (especially when their competitors are not doing so -- even if Wikipedia were a business, what competitors can you think of?).
Actually I recently patented the replacement of commas with parentheses. Since you are clearly conspiring to violate my patent, the government will now shut down slashdot.
Hey, I am willing to discuss the issue -- the real issue, which is whether or not the benefit to the American public is being maximized by our current system. If we need to adopt the Chinese approach to the Internet just to keep the current system afloat then I think the answer is, "No, not even close."
We already have absurdly long copyright terms, the censorship of software that can be used to subvert DRM (and court-ordered censorship of magazines that dare to publish links to copies of that software), and a department of "homeland security" that hijacks DNS entries in the name of protecting copyrights and trademarks. All of that is not enough? If all that is not enough, then the system needs to be fundamentally redesigned. Copyrights/trademarks/patents/trade secrets are of much lower priority than the protection of American rights and freedoms.
Piracy is a real problem
[citation needed]
I find it interesting that people want to kill PIPA and SOPA, and not change it to allow protection against piracy while still allowing people freedom to use the web
We have already given copyright, patent, and trademark owners tremendous power to fight those who violate copyrights/etc. I think the better answer is to ask whether or not the current system is actually benefiting the American public. It may be time to develop a completely new system for improving the public's access to creative works.
I have a game on the Android market. It has sold around 1000 copies... (it cost just 1 dollar so it's not a matter of cost). Some russian guy cracked my game and by looking on download counters I can tell the game was already illegaly downloaded more than 50000 times.
No offense, but you need to find a better business model. Take a look at a security engineering text (I recommend Andersen's) for more information on why DRM will always fail you in the end. There is no such thing as a secure device in an insecure environment, and software DRM is even more vulnerable.
You will find no sympathy from me. If DRM+absurdly long copyrights+the DMCA+DHS hijacking DNS records+all the other things we are doing are not enough to keep your revenue stream flowing, then you need to find a different way to make money.
Making sure that everyone knows what is happening and what is at stake is probably the most useful thing anyone can do.
Knowing Sony, it will come with a module that lets them remotely disable pieces of hardware.
If you made your living by creating music, art, or literature, I suspect you'd look at things very differently
Please, what difference does it make whether or not I am an author, musician, or artist of any kind? Copyright law affects me, it affects the society I live in, and the decisions we make about copyrights today will affect future generations. I have every right to have an opinion on the subject, and I have every right to dismiss views that make no sense, such as this:
Saying, "Hey, you got your book published, so you have no right to complain if I scan a copy into PDF, Epub, or text format and upload it as a torrent," is sophistry of the most self-serving kind, and profoundly immoral.
Profoundly immoral? To scan a book and share it with the world? You have an interesting moral code. If you wanted to read books that were lost to history, I think your view would change. Try to find "full" versions of conference papers from the 1970s, then tell me how "immoral" it is for people to dare make copies of books.
The entire point of the copyright system is to improve the public's access to science and useful art. It is not to create a new form of property; in fact, copyright is vastly different from real property rights. Unlike real property rights, copyrights expire after some period of time (unless you can buy congressmen and get them to keep extending copyrights for you). The fact that a house was purchased in 1805 has no bearing on whether or not it can be inherited generation after generation; yet nobody can hold a copyright on a book published in 1805. The public domain is what separates copyrights from property rights.
You cannot justify stealing it, simply because it's intangible
Good thing an intangible idea cannot be stolen. I suppose I could remove the part of your brain where the idea is "stored" and implant that into my brain, but I think medical science needs a few more years -- and the continued available of published research papers and books to the people who build on those works -- before such a thing is possible. "Theft" implies thatthe person who owns the thing that was stolen no longer has access to it, not simply that they cannot monetize it.
If I build a big, ugly structure next to your property and drive down its real estate value, is that theft? Why, then, is violating a copyright or a patent "theft?" Right, it is not theft, it is just depriving you of an opportunity to monetize your creative work.
A baby doesn't understand the concept of right and wrong. Unfortunately, it appears that neither do you.
Insulting people is the way to win arguments on /., right? No, the only people who turn to insults are people whose arguments are so poorly grounded that they have no other choice.
I find it interesting that you did not bother to cite this part of the constitution, which forms the basis for our patent and copyright laws:
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I suppose you tried to avoid it because it neither mandates the copyright system and it clearly indicates that copyrights must only exist for limited periods of time. Perhaps if you had spent whatever time it took you to think up your insults reading the constitution, you would have spotted this...or maybe the constitution is not even relevant in your mind, because you think that copyrights are natural rights like life, liberty, and property (although as plenty of people have pointed out, none of those rights come with expiration dates).
Who decides what public speeches are supposed to be in the public domain?
Yeah, that's a really hard one.
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor?
That was the situation for centuries, and copyright was not introduced because of some moral imperative -- in England (whose laws served as the basis for American and Canadian laws), copyrights were introduced to improve the public's access to written works.
If you think there is a moral argument for allowing authors to continue to profit from their work decades after it was done, I would like to hear it. If I produce a hammer, will I receive payment for the use of that hammer decades after I produced it? Let's turn things around -- what makes authors so special?
Pricing it higher would defeat the point. They wanted to make a computer that was affordable and reasonably powerful.