Technically, the world is net wealthier because of copying.
No, you're wrong. Each work has a value affected by how much people are willing to pay for it. People are much more likely to pay for something if they don't have it already for free. Think about it. When selling physical goods, each copy of the physical object gives away a small amount of the item's value, since the widening distribution and market saturation ends up with it being worth less. Most of the value is retained by the manufacturer, since they are the only ones who can make copies. If the media companies put no restrictions on copying, they would be splitting the value equally between them and their one customer. Both the master and the copy are exactly identical, and can be copied the same way. Therefore, they have the same value. If that customer makes another copy, that's not just splitting his copy's value, but the media company's copy as well. The fact that everyone can copy it all over the net and still find the experience valuable is a testament to just how valuable a copyrighted work can be. Each time you copy a song or movie, you're splitting the value of the media company's copy (as well as everyone else's copy), and sharing it to another person. It doesn't create value.
And that percentage of old creation which is copied into new artistic works is probably much higher than you suspect, ranging from 50% to 99% of the work which copyright is claimed upon. It's not right or ethical to be making property claims on ideas one didn't truly create.
I assure you it cannot be higher than I suspect, because I suspect roughly 100%. Yes, just about everything has been thought up on some scale, the only possible exceptions being people who create their own off-scale notes that are half-quarter semitones off the scales we're used to. I also agree that it is immoral in this context to stake claims over something built with other people's materials. However, you have not adequately responded to my point: it isn't staking claim. The public domain is essentially lending these artists the tools to build unique artworks as an investment. The artist profits from temporary ownership, and eventually has to return the completed work with all its parts back into the public domain itself. It's not annexing resources and claiming them as their own. It's giving resources and expecting something in return. It's not at all immoral, and it's a great service for our culture.
It's an irrefutable economically demonstrated fact. If art is truly valuable, absolutely every person can by definition receive more from copying the work of others than they can create themselves, and we are talking billions to the billionth power and ever growing order of magnitude benefit.
Y'know, I was playing a Legend of Zelda game the other day with a friend, and we were just laughing at the economics of rupees. You could just find them anywhere! Link never had to work to get them, at least no more than just cut some grass. It makes you wonder, how much are rupees worth? I mean, who would actually work, help society function, perform a service, keep the economy going, if they could just find money or "value" in the grass? Who would accept rupees as a payment for anything when they can keep their product/service and just find their own rupees? Rupees would be completely worthless. Zelda's economy only has a certain amount of value, based on the potential for their resources (including human labour). If anyone can find as many rupees as they want for doing nothing, every extra rupee takes its own equal share of the total economy. In fact, the only way that rupees could work, is if there were some limiting regulation about finding rupees in the grass, and each breach of that regulation would be a small steal from a huge number of people.
This is similar to your "irrefutable economically demonstrated fact". If people could just pull value out of the air, why would anyone work?
Good job KDE! It's yet another reason to stop using GNOME, if all the Microsoft pandering wasn't enough.
The very best way to pander to Microsoft is to make your systems look and feel completely different from theirs, and to overload the interface with configuration options and a cluttered interface. That way, you manage to alienate any flip-floppers, and strengthen the hardcore geek market, which MS accepts they will never win back. MS wins because no-one leaves their platform, the competitor survives on a niche market. GNOME is probably Microsoft's worst nightmare right about now.
If you absolutely insist on recklessly combining faith and science, then I suggest you do some reading first. Firstly, you'll find out that new species only occur when a single species has been significantly separated for a long period of time (i.e. many, many generations, and separated by more than a plane trip). You'll also find out that evolution happens with or without new species, as an entire species in similar environments can evolve in roughly the same direction. Finally, you'll find out that humans are a rare case of extremely slow evolution, because we're so good at avoiding natural selection.
Yes, but to what end? What's the point in solving obesity and cancer, when everyone who would benefit from this program would never have had cancer or obesity? What's the point in forcing everyone to live longer or die without reproducing, when it would be any different for them either way? Oh wait, you answered that with point number 3.
Seriously, are MS intending to hand Apple a computer media format monopoly on a silver platter?
Apple: Why thank you Microsoft! A computer media format monopoly! How did you know? MS: Anything to make peace. I just want us to be friends. Apple: That's so sweet. And what's this? An apple? Looks delicious too... MS laughs evilly under its breath
Of course there's value in a "copyrighted work". Value is by definition created for the copier every time he copies (no matter whether it's the artist copying the work or previous artists, or consumers copying the work of current artists). But the artist freely copies that bundled public domain value portion into his work. And I'm sick and tired of the propaganda which fails to acknowledge that artists copy the ideas of others constantly.
OK, I'm with you so far, with two exceptions. Number one, you can't create value. All your doing is illegally redistributing value from the copyright holder to you. Some call that stealing. Number two, I haven't actually seen any propaganda that tries to suppress that fact.
The artists are inserting copied value into their works just as consumers are inserting copied value into their works (physical hds, cds, etc.).
As in piracy, right? Wrong. There's a lot more to the creation of copyrighted works than just copying something else bit for bit. But if you disagree, again, why don't you just create your own works and stop redistributing the value of ones created by other people (a.k.a stealing)?
There's no need for a shortcut copyright law at all when artists can demand they be paid up front before releasing their product. If they don't get paid what they want to be paid, they can not waste their time producing something people don't want to pay for.
On the same token, there's nothing stopping an artist doing that. If you really think that'd be more efficient, then by all means, release your creativity that way. You can even talk to other artists and encourage them to do so as well. As for the implication that we'd be better served without copyright law, that's just absurd. Why don't we let the two business models compete, and if copyright indeed becomes superfluous (i.e. when it's not used any more, and when all copyrights have expired), then we can redact it. However, I'm not optimistic, because I doubt people will allow copyright to die. It's essential to things like the GPL, which have a large following.
Also I'd like to add that even though it'd be more efficient on the supply side to ask what everyone wants, it'd be more inconvenient to the consumer if the works ended up being crap. Both systems could work, I guess, but copyright requires less organisation on the consumer end, and that's a major plus for efficiency.
Copyright is not in any meaningful definition "temporary" or "limited". The current length of the copyright term is clearly unconstitutional. *Limited* should apply the same to all uses in the law. You cannot file charges for crimes committed after a certain period of time. Copyright limits should match that 2-4 year window (or whatever it is).
Look in a dictionary. I have never, ever seen a definition for temporary or limited that specifies any specific number of years. While I agree that copyright terms leave a lot to be desired, your rant about them being "clearly" unconstitutional is way off. You're just as likely to get the law changed so that charges can be filed 75 years past the person's death. It's not gonna happen.
Excuses, excuses. And copiers don't so much as copy the work of artists as they combine them into uniquely arranged compositional pieces, played in different orders on the iPods and burned cds.
Well, gee. That was bit of a stretch. Like I said, if it's not that different, then take the legal road, rather than the illegal one that everyone else finds so much easier.
Except it's the other way around. Imagine a military scientist suddenly realising that giant lasers are more fun than just hitting targets from 30,000ft away. There'd be the smell of burnt cheese ingrained in the desk permanently, or at least its charred remains.
Which would lie on the charred remains of the floor, in a 100ft ditch.
... the really tricky thing is incorporating that into a meme.
Sharks with frickin' steel containers, filled with frickin' high explosives and a frickin fuse, all tied to their heads, while being dropped out of a frickin' plane.
... I won't have access to a computer for a couple of days from tomorrow, so I won't be able to reply then. Don't take it as a loss of interest, because I look forward to being able to continue this discussion to the "natural conclusion".
That wasn't sarcastic. I meant that I respect your opinions.
Oh good:) To be honest though, I completely misread it as "can't" rather than "can". I guess I'm far too used to hearing "I can't say the same about you".
They use the same methods to gather evidence for all of them, which makes all of them suspect.
That's not really the point. If you remember, I was saying we can't stop piracy, but we can slow it and reimburse copyright holders for whatever little is left. Right now, while piracy is rampant, it pays financially to recklessly trample the rights of 12-year-old girls. The system works nicely when piracy is low enough so that each suit can be dealt with tact and respect, but the situation becomes a whole lot uglier.
"Most people"?
I know that in at least some cases, the probability that they will buy that media rises considerably.
It depends on the availability of the works. If people are mainly sharing single music tracks, for example, then yes I expect there would be some album sales that wouldn't have otherwise occurred (but at the expense of the singles market). I'd also like to point out that nowadays, our popular culture is very much into singles rather than albums, and I believe the success of iTunes was partially due to that trend. The sharing would eat up the more lucrative and popular market, which would result in net losses for the industry. However, the point is somewhat moot, because there are plenty of large archives with not only entire albums, but also comprehensive collections of an artist's work. If there are a significant number of people out there who do download a song/album, and buy it if they like it, then as I've said a couple of times before, the numbers of their kind (i.e. people who feel indebted enough to artists to pay them) may diminish.
As for your example of the TV series, it was rejected, and the artists didn't expect to make any more money off it. It was technically piracy, since the people didn't get explicit permission to watch it, but it wasn't piracy in spirit, since the artist abandoned it.
I'm not asserting it one way or another, I think it comes back to "you can't know".
Sure. I guess this is one of those "natural conclusions" we were postulating about.
Also, each item is not an island unto itself. There is a total maximum amount of money that a person has, or is willing to spend, on media. Anything they pirate above and beyond that, well, that's probability zero, because they'd never have bought it.
Yep, I mostly agree, except that my own mathematical mind would phrase it as a graph, where probability slopes sharply down as cumulative price approaches the individual's earnings. Even after the earnings, I suppose he could get a loan. Not very likely, but not impossible. Although, I don't know why I'm arguing this, because it's effectively zero. What I do want to say is we can take an average, which is exactly what we're doing. Each person's earnings are different, each person's total value of pirated materials is different, but we just take the average. All the massive pirated media collections out there make the individual probability, on average, very low, but I would say not low enough to make it negligible.
Have they never done that before? They seemed to put up quite a proactive fight against VHS.
I never said it had to be original, it's just that they adapted to the piracy threat. Is piracy so fundamentally different from VHS that the media companies can't use the same technique for fighting both? It's still adaptation, but it's the same adaptation they made before, and it still carries similar risks.
How would it become illegal?
It doesn't have to be too broad. Something like making it illegal to block IP addresses in the government range, or something like that. Or even,
I don't think I did. I was saying, there is value in a copyrighted work, even if it all comes from the public domain. If ideas bundled from the public domain are so worthless, and the act of formulating and distributing them is so worthless, then surely you can do it all yourself, and have absolutely no need to violate the law by copying them without permission.
public domain ideas are being *annexed* into the latest creative works. This makes the copyright claims invalid and void.
No, that's the reason why copyright is only temporary. They don't sell the ideas so much as they sell their combination of them. Eventually, those ideas must be returned to the public domain for other people to use. Meanwhile, there are people out there who find the service valuable (even if you don't), and the artist was the person who did the work.
Oh. Well, I do respect your opinions, even if you don't respect mine. I still think you're wrong though.
Suing the pants off a 12-year-old girl is not about reimbursing anyone, and you know it. She simply doesn't have the money.
Very perceptive. I do know it. I'm more referring to the lawsuits that aren't faux pas or travesties in justice.
And reimburse them for what? First, you have to prove that a pirated movie is a lost sale.
OK, let's just say that there is a certain probability that you will buy a certain piece of media. That figure is, of course, debatable and subjective. Most people would generally agree that it lies between 1 and 0, not inclusive. Whenever most people pirate a piece of media, the probability that they will buy that media falls considerably. They have the media, no-one caught them, it doesn't really feel that bad. They have robbed the **AA of the potential sale, rather than the sale itself, resulting in fair damages of (p1-p2)*v, where p1 is the initial probability, p2 is the probability after pirating, and v is the price of the media. In a sample as big as piracy currently is, I have little to no doubt the **AA is losing money they would have had (i.e. p1,p2~=0), had piracy never existed. That's what's being reimbursed, even if the actual numbers are subjective.
Somehow, that doesn't seem so much an adaptation to me. I'm sure they knew how to sue already.
Yes, but they actually put their reputation and money on the line, and were proactive about stopping it. It's adaptation enough for me.
It also doesn't really do much even to slow down piracy. All it does right now is ensure that people use PeerGuardian.
It is slowing down piracy. If it continues to slow much further, and people do use PeerGuardian to cover their tracks, then expect it to become illegal and piracy to slow even more. I don't want that to happen, but it may well if people continue to flaunt the law at the expense of the **AA.
Don't hold your breath, but I'll bookmark that.
I wasn't planning to. I know how long NDAs can last.
One example: iTunes.
iTunes happens to be highly polished and extremely usable. You can remove many of the differences by integrating music library and syncing software into the sharing client. You could make it of similar usability to iTunes. It's the fakes and viruses that are the biggest hurdle, but they can fixed, for example, with a simple moderation system for files. I see no reason why stores have more potential than P2P clients. OTOH though, you've successfully shown me the reverse is true (and thus proved me wrong). Touche.
But do the legitimate stores right, and the number will drop significantly -- especially if we know that most of our money is going straight to the band -- maybe not the case with iTunes, but certainly is with some other online stores, and absolutely if it's right off the band's website.
If every piece of media is off a different website, then P2P will win hands down.
Whatever happens, it can't be worse than the total, catastrophic failure that is the music industry today.
I don't think you realise exactly how good we have it. We have fantastic access to huge amounts of entertainment and information. We get to pick and choose from millions of different works, and if you like a certain style, you're pretty much guaranteed to find more of it surviving off a niche market. It's easier than ever to become an artist, and to distribute the works however way you like. The art we have is being distributed in digital and physical form for convenience and maximum access. Even people without internet connections manage to get what they want under this system.
Imagine how much worse it could be under copyright. I believe I've
In the rare instance when I actually need to call support...
Hm. You even call tech support? I haven't called in 20 years. And whenever I visit their offices, they're all like "Oooh, velvetflamebait, you no call for ages! You such a big man, me love you long time!"
Similarly, stealing will deprive one person of $X worth of assets, copyright infringement will deprive one person of $X worth of assets again, and again, and again, and again...
You either sign a contract with an RIAA label or live in obscurity. Doesn't sound like much of a choice does it?
Yeah, tragically, that's pretty much the way the free market works. If one service happens to be of exceptional quality, there won't seem to be much of a choice. If the RIAA really do screw you over in terms of payment, then surely you'd be better off at a lesser known indie label, right?
I'm sorry, but if I pay for something, I should be able to use it on any device of my choosing in the manner it was intended to be used.
All creative content is *bundling* creative ideas created by others not the latest current artists to bundle ideas created by others. So who's the one who is "naive" about where the content came from? If you think it's all so shitty that ideas cannot be owned because they are copying other ideas on many different levels, THEN STOP MAKING CONTENT THAT BUNDLES THE IDEAS OF OTHERS!
If these "bundles of ideas" are so trivial, and not worthy of declaring as property, surely you and everyone else can resist pirating them, right? I mean, why bother to the extent of crossing the law all for the sake of these crappy idea-bundles that no-one deserves recognition for?
If they're worth pirating, they're worth something, and if they're worth something, why not let that something go to the artists who actually allowed you to enjoy it in the first place?
I don't know why you're ripping them off so much. They're giving people a chance to sell data about their usage habits to MS in exchange for some free, very valuable software. Yeah, yeah, I know Windows sucks, and I know you'd probably rather buy five copies over being forced to endure using one for three months, but so what? You don't have to participate. You can tell your friends, warn them about the risks of openly sharing usage habits and about the minimum usage standard, and who knows? Maybe your friends will be better off?
Not only that, but monitoring usage patterns may actually end up with improvements in future releases, but I can't say I'm optimistic...
And since you can't do anything about piracy, that is why these legitimate industries need to wake up now and adapt yesterday.
We can do something about piracy, and we already are. We can't stop it, of course, but we can slow it, and we can attempt to force the ones we do catch to reimburse the copyright holder. The legitimate industries have already woken up and adapted: they have started a campaign of suing, putting their own resources on the line in order to put a stop to the trend. But it seems a little aggressive to some and poorly executed to most. Still, kudos to them for trying in a timely manner.
I will say that while at least you have the right problem now, you're still looking at it entirely the wrong way. And I will say that it has been done successfully before -- there exist things that have practically no DRM, yet are not ever pirated, because the pirated copy, despite being bit-for-bit identical and perfectly functional, is of much less worth than the original.
And I will not say more than that, yet.
If you want to stay in touch, I'll get back to you once I'm allowed to say something, and we can continue the discussion then...
Sounds pretty interesting. I'll put a journal entry up, and you can reply to it when you're ready.
You'd be amazed how convenient it can be made. Even with a credit card, an online store can be made slicker than BitTorrent.
I realised. My point was that you're never going to surpass the potential of a P2P network. Bittorrent happens to be a bad example because of its tracking system.
That's who I was looking for. But you just proved my point: Two thirds of them bought it, and Radiohead still made a fortune on it.
For now they did. What happens when more music is presented this way? It will become a system based on guilt, and eventually, once more and more people offer their music for free, the guilt may well wear thin. It's very easy to rationalise the situation in favour not paying for something (look how popular piracy is today), and it's a slippery slope from there. I'm not saying it will definitely happen, but we need more tests before we can wholeheartedly embrace the system, and test its long-term effects. If it works, then comes the pressuring of the RIAA to provide music that way.
Strawman. I didn't suggest giving away stuff for free.
Not that it's particularly relevant, but I never meant to suggest you did.
Now, it's not copyright law that I'm opposed to, directly. It's both how strongly it's enforced, and the DMCA, and its anti-circumvention mechanism.
Fair enough. I see your point, even though I personally don't exactly agree. I object to copyright lengths and to the haphazard manner that the **AA is prosecuting people, with tenuous evidence. I get why they do it (to make the entire effort more efficient), but it's no excuse for subverting the legal system. I don't really have a problem with the DMCA/DRM either. It's their works, they can do what they want with them in that time, so long as they don't try to undermine their copyright term limits.
The whole point of DMCA anti-circumvention is that if you circumvent copy protection, you might be about to violate copyright law. Which is a completely retarded reason for making a law, wouldn't you agree? After all, if you actually do violate copyright law, that's already illegal, because, you know, you violated copyright law! And what, exactly, is the harm in circumventing copy protection without violating copyright law?
Yeah I know it sounds stupid, but it's there for the same reason we legally sanction locks. Just opening a locked door is against the law, not because there's anything particularly damaging about opening someone else's locked door, but because it's considered an overt act. It makes it easier to catch people who would follow through with the a
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No, you're wrong. Each work has a value affected by how much people are willing to pay for it. People are much more likely to pay for something if they don't have it already for free. Think about it. When selling physical goods, each copy of the physical object gives away a small amount of the item's value, since the widening distribution and market saturation ends up with it being worth less. Most of the value is retained by the manufacturer, since they are the only ones who can make copies. If the media companies put no restrictions on copying, they would be splitting the value equally between them and their one customer. Both the master and the copy are exactly identical, and can be copied the same way. Therefore, they have the same value. If that customer makes another copy, that's not just splitting his copy's value, but the media company's copy as well. The fact that everyone can copy it all over the net and still find the experience valuable is a testament to just how valuable a copyrighted work can be. Each time you copy a song or movie, you're splitting the value of the media company's copy (as well as everyone else's copy), and sharing it to another person. It doesn't create value.
I assure you it cannot be higher than I suspect, because I suspect roughly 100%. Yes, just about everything has been thought up on some scale, the only possible exceptions being people who create their own off-scale notes that are half-quarter semitones off the scales we're used to. I also agree that it is immoral in this context to stake claims over something built with other people's materials. However, you have not adequately responded to my point: it isn't staking claim. The public domain is essentially lending these artists the tools to build unique artworks as an investment. The artist profits from temporary ownership, and eventually has to return the completed work with all its parts back into the public domain itself. It's not annexing resources and claiming them as their own. It's giving resources and expecting something in return. It's not at all immoral, and it's a great service for our culture.
Y'know, I was playing a Legend of Zelda game the other day with a friend, and we were just laughing at the economics of rupees. You could just find them anywhere! Link never had to work to get them, at least no more than just cut some grass. It makes you wonder, how much are rupees worth? I mean, who would actually work, help society function, perform a service, keep the economy going, if they could just find money or "value" in the grass? Who would accept rupees as a payment for anything when they can keep their product/service and just find their own rupees? Rupees would be completely worthless. Zelda's economy only has a certain amount of value, based on the potential for their resources (including human labour). If anyone can find as many rupees as they want for doing nothing, every extra rupee takes its own equal share of the total economy. In fact, the only way that rupees could work, is if there were some limiting regulation about finding rupees in the grass, and each breach of that regulation would be a small steal from a huge number of people.
This is similar to your "irrefutable economically demonstrated fact". If people could just pull value out of the air, why would anyone work?
If you absolutely insist on recklessly combining faith and science, then I suggest you do some reading first. Firstly, you'll find out that new species only occur when a single species has been significantly separated for a long period of time (i.e. many, many generations, and separated by more than a plane trip). You'll also find out that evolution happens with or without new species, as an entire species in similar environments can evolve in roughly the same direction. Finally, you'll find out that humans are a rare case of extremely slow evolution, because we're so good at avoiding natural selection.
Yes, but to what end? What's the point in solving obesity and cancer, when everyone who would benefit from this program would never have had cancer or obesity? What's the point in forcing everyone to live longer or die without reproducing, when it would be any different for them either way? Oh wait, you answered that with point number 3.
MS: Anything to make peace. I just want us to be friends.
Apple: That's so sweet. And what's this? An apple? Looks delicious too...
MS laughs evilly under its breath
Shhh! Don't say that! You're bottoming out the arguments of so many rabid anti-**AA fanbois right now!
XKCD!
Also I'd like to add that even though it'd be more efficient on the supply side to ask what everyone wants, it'd be more inconvenient to the consumer if the works ended up being crap. Both systems could work, I guess, but copyright requires less organisation on the consumer end, and that's a major plus for efficiency.Look in a dictionary. I have never, ever seen a definition for temporary or limited that specifies any specific number of years. While I agree that copyright terms leave a lot to be desired, your rant about them being "clearly" unconstitutional is way off. You're just as likely to get the law changed so that charges can be filed 75 years past the person's death. It's not gonna happen.Well, gee. That was bit of a stretch. Like I said, if it's not that different, then take the legal road, rather than the illegal one that everyone else finds so much easier.
Except it's the other way around. Imagine a military scientist suddenly realising that giant lasers are more fun than just hitting targets from 30,000ft away. There'd be the smell of burnt cheese ingrained in the desk permanently, or at least its charred remains.
Which would lie on the charred remains of the floor, in a 100ft ditch.
... the really tricky thing is incorporating that into a meme.
Sharks with frickin' steel containers, filled with frickin' high explosives and a frickin fuse, all tied to their heads, while being dropped out of a frickin' plane.
Your comment would have been the funniest I've read all week, but unfortunately, you were edged out by this guy. Kudos for runner up though.
... I won't have access to a computer for a couple of days from tomorrow, so I won't be able to reply then. Don't take it as a loss of interest, because I look forward to being able to continue this discussion to the "natural conclusion".
Oh good :) To be honest though, I completely misread it as "can't" rather than "can". I guess I'm far too used to hearing "I can't say the same about you".
That's not really the point. If you remember, I was saying we can't stop piracy, but we can slow it and reimburse copyright holders for whatever little is left. Right now, while piracy is rampant, it pays financially to recklessly trample the rights of 12-year-old girls. The system works nicely when piracy is low enough so that each suit can be dealt with tact and respect, but the situation becomes a whole lot uglier.
It depends on the availability of the works. If people are mainly sharing single music tracks, for example, then yes I expect there would be some album sales that wouldn't have otherwise occurred (but at the expense of the singles market). I'd also like to point out that nowadays, our popular culture is very much into singles rather than albums, and I believe the success of iTunes was partially due to that trend. The sharing would eat up the more lucrative and popular market, which would result in net losses for the industry. However, the point is somewhat moot, because there are plenty of large archives with not only entire albums, but also comprehensive collections of an artist's work. If there are a significant number of people out there who do download a song/album, and buy it if they like it, then as I've said a couple of times before, the numbers of their kind (i.e. people who feel indebted enough to artists to pay them) may diminish.
As for your example of the TV series, it was rejected, and the artists didn't expect to make any more money off it. It was technically piracy, since the people didn't get explicit permission to watch it, but it wasn't piracy in spirit, since the artist abandoned it.
Sure. I guess this is one of those "natural conclusions" we were postulating about.
Yep, I mostly agree, except that my own mathematical mind would phrase it as a graph, where probability slopes sharply down as cumulative price approaches the individual's earnings. Even after the earnings, I suppose he could get a loan. Not very likely, but not impossible. Although, I don't know why I'm arguing this, because it's effectively zero. What I do want to say is we can take an average, which is exactly what we're doing. Each person's earnings are different, each person's total value of pirated materials is different, but we just take the average. All the massive pirated media collections out there make the individual probability, on average, very low, but I would say not low enough to make it negligible.
I never said it had to be original, it's just that they adapted to the piracy threat. Is piracy so fundamentally different from VHS that the media companies can't use the same technique for fighting both? It's still adaptation, but it's the same adaptation they made before, and it still carries similar risks.
It doesn't have to be too broad. Something like making it illegal to block IP addresses in the government range, or something like that. Or even,
Don't say "2015"! You'll get everyone's hopes up! Just keep saying "soon".
Oh. Well, I do respect your opinions, even if you don't respect mine. I still think you're wrong though.
Very perceptive. I do know it. I'm more referring to the lawsuits that aren't faux pas or travesties in justice.
OK, let's just say that there is a certain probability that you will buy a certain piece of media. That figure is, of course, debatable and subjective. Most people would generally agree that it lies between 1 and 0, not inclusive. Whenever most people pirate a piece of media, the probability that they will buy that media falls considerably. They have the media, no-one caught them, it doesn't really feel that bad. They have robbed the **AA of the potential sale, rather than the sale itself, resulting in fair damages of (p1-p2)*v, where p1 is the initial probability, p2 is the probability after pirating, and v is the price of the media. In a sample as big as piracy currently is, I have little to no doubt the **AA is losing money they would have had (i.e. p1,p2~=0), had piracy never existed. That's what's being reimbursed, even if the actual numbers are subjective.
Yes, but they actually put their reputation and money on the line, and were proactive about stopping it. It's adaptation enough for me.
It is slowing down piracy. If it continues to slow much further, and people do use PeerGuardian to cover their tracks, then expect it to become illegal and piracy to slow even more. I don't want that to happen, but it may well if people continue to flaunt the law at the expense of the **AA.
I wasn't planning to. I know how long NDAs can last.
iTunes happens to be highly polished and extremely usable. You can remove many of the differences by integrating music library and syncing software into the sharing client. You could make it of similar usability to iTunes. It's the fakes and viruses that are the biggest hurdle, but they can fixed, for example, with a simple moderation system for files. I see no reason why stores have more potential than P2P clients. OTOH though, you've successfully shown me the reverse is true (and thus proved me wrong). Touche.
If every piece of media is off a different website, then P2P will win hands down.
I don't think you realise exactly how good we have it. We have fantastic access to huge amounts of entertainment and information. We get to pick and choose from millions of different works, and if you like a certain style, you're pretty much guaranteed to find more of it surviving off a niche market. It's easier than ever to become an artist, and to distribute the works however way you like. The art we have is being distributed in digital and physical form for convenience and maximum access. Even people without internet connections manage to get what they want under this system.
Imagine how much worse it could be under copyright. I believe I've
Did I mention they were all hot Asian babes?
... news at 11.
Y4Y?
Similarly, stealing will deprive one person of $X worth of assets, copyright infringement will deprive one person of $X worth of assets again, and again, and again, and again...
If they're worth pirating, they're worth something, and if they're worth something, why not let that something go to the artists who actually allowed you to enjoy it in the first place?
I don't know why you're ripping them off so much. They're giving people a chance to sell data about their usage habits to MS in exchange for some free, very valuable software. Yeah, yeah, I know Windows sucks, and I know you'd probably rather buy five copies over being forced to endure using one for three months, but so what? You don't have to participate. You can tell your friends, warn them about the risks of openly sharing usage habits and about the minimum usage standard, and who knows? Maybe your friends will be better off?
Not only that, but monitoring usage patterns may actually end up with improvements in future releases, but I can't say I'm optimistic...
We can do something about piracy, and we already are. We can't stop it, of course, but we can slow it, and we can attempt to force the ones we do catch to reimburse the copyright holder. The legitimate industries have already woken up and adapted: they have started a campaign of suing, putting their own resources on the line in order to put a stop to the trend. But it seems a little aggressive to some and poorly executed to most. Still, kudos to them for trying in a timely manner.
Sounds pretty interesting. I'll put a journal entry up, and you can reply to it when you're ready.
I realised. My point was that you're never going to surpass the potential of a P2P network. Bittorrent happens to be a bad example because of its tracking system.
For now they did. What happens when more music is presented this way? It will become a system based on guilt, and eventually, once more and more people offer their music for free, the guilt may well wear thin. It's very easy to rationalise the situation in favour not paying for something (look how popular piracy is today), and it's a slippery slope from there. I'm not saying it will definitely happen, but we need more tests before we can wholeheartedly embrace the system, and test its long-term effects. If it works, then comes the pressuring of the RIAA to provide music that way.
Not that it's particularly relevant, but I never meant to suggest you did.
Fair enough. I see your point, even though I personally don't exactly agree. I object to copyright lengths and to the haphazard manner that the **AA is prosecuting people, with tenuous evidence. I get why they do it (to make the entire effort more efficient), but it's no excuse for subverting the legal system. I don't really have a problem with the DMCA/DRM either. It's their works, they can do what they want with them in that time, so long as they don't try to undermine their copyright term limits.
Yeah I know it sounds stupid, but it's there for the same reason we legally sanction locks. Just opening a locked door is against the law, not because there's anything particularly damaging about opening someone else's locked door, but because it's considered an overt act. It makes it easier to catch people who would follow through with the a