A number of instances clearly innocent people, including computer illiterates without any computer use at all have been attacked by the RIAA.
"Clearly innocent" is a matter for the courts to decide. Certainly not grounds for being declared a criminal organisation.
A number of articles have discussed RIAA's lack of proper renumeration to small artists.
Based on what some guy on the internet considers fair, or based on them not upholding their end of a contract? Still, that's more of a civil matter between them and artists.
Knowingly proposing, even getting passed, unconstitutional laws is a usurpation of peoples' rights.
Proposing is not a crime and "getting a law passed" is a misnomer. It's certainly not a "usurpation of peoples' rights". It is, in effect, an offer to people as a whole to curtail certain fringe rights in exchange for protection against slump in copyrighted work production. Again, not the actions of a criminal organisation.
The RIAA's behaviour isn't criminal, and they aren't a criminal organisation. They actually do do good things, which I won't bother going through here. Their actions, however, serve to highlight problems within political and legal systems that can neither be solved nor aggravated through copyright law proposals.
The RIAA is an organization that has repeatedly shown no respect for other persons or property...
... which can be said even more so about the subculture they're trying to eliminate. Better still, if that subculture is eliminated first, they'll stop (or at least tone it down a lot), and then we can focus on making them pay for their transgressions.
... including the myriad recording artists...
Really? What property of artists are the RIAA abusing? I believe they signed a contract that says the property I suspect you refer to is not their property at all.
the plain intent of the Constitution, or its corpus.
The laws, correct? They're allowed to propose any law they want. Period.
Nope, I guess they aren't a criminal organisation after all. I guess emotive rhetoric and mod points don't make a guy correct.
I call it "copyright", because controlling distribution in this way is neither novel nor unintended. It's just artists exerting control over their works in exchange for creation. Same-ol', same-ol'.
Kraftwerk are 5 people pressing big play buttons and people are quite happy to go and to listen to them doing it.
Most people I know would feel mightily ripped off to see a five people press a play button because...
if people come to listen to them doing it then their purpose is achieved is it not?
... the purpose of a live performance is to hear them perform live (call me crazy). If I wanted to hear something pre-recorded, I would want a studio recording instead. I can take it home, and it ends up much cheaper, since I don't have to pay for their time while listening to their records. Basically it takes the worst elements from playing at home (music is not dynamic, there's no rapport between the musicians and their audience) and the worst elements of playing live (the music is played, inflexibly, from start to finish, it's expensive, and I can only listen once).
Why would you be constrained to either going to concerts or listening to crappy bootlegs of concerts?
I don't know if you know this, but this thread was initially about abolishing copyright. I was talking about being constrained because live performances are suggested to replace recordings, so that musicians (but no mention of any other artists) can make money without copyright (so we can abolish it, and yaddah yaddah yaddah). The idea is that most artists won't bother investing in a high quality recording session, because they'd be creating something which competes with their live concerts, plus it costs them time and money to do so.
The basic fact is some bands tour almost constantly and are excellent musicians but the bands most favoured by record companies hardly know one end of their instrument from the other, couldn't care less about playing their music and shift a lot of units in the targetted demographic. The sooner such bands/artists fall down dead the better.
That's a little patronising, don't you think? I think the "targeted demographic" are perfectly capable of deciding what they enjoy. Besides, if those bands indeed push units better, won't they be the ones who survive when push comes to shove? It's not difficult to lip-synch, after all.
I think this is what safe harbour is for. All the copyright holder has to do (and they do) is send Google a takedown notice and they'll generally comply. Try sending a takedown notice (or even a friendly request) to TPB and see what happens.
There's a delicate art to creating analogies. Identifying situations with similarities is the easy part. The real trick is identifying two situations without differences relevant to the situation. It's those differences that sink analogies.
For example, there is a difference between The Pirate Bay and Google, namely intent (as the OP and others have correctly identified). Intent makes all the difference when it comes to courts, and people in general. That means that analogies between TPB and Google will be rendered essentially meaningless.
I agree with you; it's just that I misspoke. We do indeed have a sea of rights (I was talking about chaos being the ultimate freedom before), but to say any one of them is sacred without practical justification is bullshit. We restricted copying previously, so we would have to (re)grant copying as a right. The reason to do so is not some bullshit sanctity argument about the right being present since the evolution of the second man. Otherwise, we would also enshrine murder. The reason to (re)grant copying rights needs to be founded in practical terms.
Isn't it satisfying when 90% of the divide between two opposing opinions simply fall away?:)
I never tried to imply that there wouldn't be an adverse effect, only that it would not be as drastic as you seemed to imply.
We really need a really good estimate of exactly how much damage our culture is going to sustain. Right now it's very large and reasonably healthy, with the arguable exception of pop culture. Abolishing copyright, as you said, will have an adverse effect. Now, it seems reasonable that we can sustain an adverse effect in exchange for free access to what's left, but we must know exactly how much damage.
My doom and gloom is technically possible, and I have even brushed over some reasons why I think things have decent chance of really going that far south. I truly think that we stand to lose everything. Popular culture, fringe culture, even the guys already working for free from their basements, we stand to lose it all. Like I mentioned, artists will be forced to get a paying job and spend less time on their art, which will, in practical terms, mean less quantity, less quality, and less variety (since more expensive/more time-consuming works will become infeasible). As new works become increasingly, genuinely scarce, certain things will happen:
1) Expensive live tours will become very rare, very quickly, as people realise they can get music from home instantly for free. 2) People will stop idolising the rock star/film star, as the job transforms into working alone from home. 3) People will stop aiming to become a star, and will stop seeing major art-forms as outlets for their showmanship 4) Less people will become stars, which feeds back into the "less variety" and 1) 5) People will be less inspired by crappier and fewer artworks feeding again into 3) and 4)
As you can see, in this scenario, culture slides slowly towards insignificance. We take for granted what copyright has done for us already, and what copyright continues to do. We assume that we will always have artistic people vying to strut their stuff on stage, but the whole process is a vicious cycle. Sure, certain people will still have flashes of inspiration amidst all the drudgery, but exactly how many people are that creative so as to have an unprovoked, original idea?
But the gist of this is that I'm trying to point out that we're not really in any danger of losing this since there is a lot that is already here, and there are people continuing to create.
I think you'll find that old works become old very quickly. Certain classics have withstood the test of time, but a vast majority have faded into obscurity. I mean, there are old works out there in the public domain, or if not, they're on sale for very low prices, yet people still seem to insist on spending comparatively gigantic amounts of money on new works. What does that say?
You may note that the creation of native artifacts (or trinkets would maybe be a better term) is still pretty strong in places with a large amount of tourism.
You may also note that people pay for trinkets, which explains the correlation between demand and supply.
Even the people who aren't skilled enough to create are driven to pay somebody else to create a web site.
But do they have the money to do so? After spending on instruments/tools, and paying for webspace, do they have the money? Things become seriously hard when the commercial value of what you're doing is sucked dry. (Yeah, yeah, I know, some people manage it.)
Besides, individual websites are an extremely poor way of distributing. No-one will know that you're there, so there won't be enough of a spark to generate word-of-mouth (assuming the work even has the potential to generate word-of-mouth). You would have to advertise, which costs big bucks. The only real way to distribute would be to go to a centralised site,
Fantastic. Like the word "newspeak", meaning "I can't think of an adequate rebuttal for that".
If anyone is advocating the ravaging of culture it is YOU and your fellow corporate cronies that want to ensure that our culture remains under the thumb of large multi-national corporations in perpetuity.
Last I checked, there were no corporate cronies behind me, and absolutely no-one who wants culture to be under the thumb of multi-nationals, or for copyrights to be perpetual. All I can see on this screen is the tragic small-minded ravings of someone who thinks that only shills disagree with him. Pathetic, really.
You are also confusing "culture" with "pop culture".
Nope, I meant exactly what I said. There's no distinguishing from popular culture and... well... unpopular culture here, except that popular culture is the only thing that has a chance of surviving post-copyright. I think you may be confusing emotional appeal with reason. It's a common mistake from people who like to call me a shill.
What is 'electronic' music any different to any other sort of music?
The kind that benefit from the delicate, complex layering, and precise timing. I suppose we could simply pay $70 to listen as the artist presses a big play button on stage, but that would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?
Also, sometimes I don't feel like going to live gigs to hear music, nor do I feel like listening to crappy bootleg recordings of the concert. Sometimes I feel like a little light jazz at home at night in front of the fire.
Did I consent to having the future of my (and my children's) culture ravaged for your gratification? Did the copyright holder consent to having the value of their investments (that they paid for out of pocket) pissed on for said gratification?
The whole thing revolves around whether you believe that there is such a thing as "intellectual property".
Oh no, nothing can be further from the truth! Intellectual property is just a term, and whatever you call what we now refer to as intellectual property is irrelevant. It comes down to two issues:
1) Is it OK, for the sake of culture, to restrict the private* information transactions of individuals, and 2) Are intellectual property laws necessary, or even capable of safeguarding culture
Calling it property or not is a tiny issue in semantics, and holds exactly zero stake in whether building "intellectual property" into law is A Good Thing.
* I use "private" very loosely, because most transactions of interest are quite public, others mostly fall into fair use.
I never said it(murder) was either a right or a freedom, I was merely explaining why the activity is legislated against. You were the one that said "thinking about it, murder is freedom for the murderer".
Murdering is a freedom. Right to life is not. I'm not going to bang on about it any more, since we agree.
I probably can't give you proof of that, since you modified artists with commercial.
Forgive me. I honestly thought that commercial artists were a subset of artists as a whole.
I backed it up by the next statement referring to people planting flowers in their yard. Perhaps you don't consider that artwork, but as they say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
It is, most certainly, an artwork, but not easily reproducible, nor possible to distribute. It's a pretty meaningless argument for "artists will be driven to create without income", since it's one single example trying to prove a huge, huge alleged trend, and it doesn't deal with distribution. No-one doubted that certain people will create certain things without income, but it is truly absurd to think that there won't be an adverse effect from dismantling the industry that we rely on so heavily today.
I can however give you proof of artists creating because they are driven to do so, regardless of monetary compensation, but I shouldn't have to, as a quick perusal of many websites across the internet should make that very clear.
OK, just so you realise, you have shifted your argument (or so it seems) subtly from an absurd, but very relevant argument ("most artists will create") to a very sensible, but irrelevant argument ("some artists will create"). It's a change that is subtle in semantics, but is very significant in terms of concepts. So, for the record, here's my stance:
1) There are artists who will continue to create and distribute without money 2) Most artists will be forced to pack up their instruments and computers, and get a real job
In fact, this subtle semantic distinction serves very well for the anti-copyright argument.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of the paragraph, because I believe it would insult your intelligence to restate my already suitable arguments.
We have just the created the most valuable tool that allows for the deepest culture penetration known to mankind. The internet and ability to share files are having a larger impact on our culture than the spice trade and trade in native artifacts across the world ever did.
Penetration is more than distribution; it's also about creation. (How can you penetrate, without a penis?;) The issue mostly relies on artists continuing to create.
Just as a side note, I was trying out a free music service that used bittorrent. I still supported copyright back then, and I was quite excited to get access to a whole lot of free music. The music was OK (I found one album I enjoyed, but it definitely needed some polish, and definitely couldn't be performed live), but the real problem was that most albums had no seeders, and thus listening was impossible. I found that with a vast majority of albums I tried, which was a real problem. That's not to say that effective, cheap internet distribution is not possible, but it does make the lesser known and less popular works are harder to get a hold of.
Art, and the human desire to create will die when the last man dies. We are never in danger of losing this, as this is why we live.
There's still the question of amounts. As I said, it's all well and good to say it will never die, but that doesn't preclude it from remaining deathly ill until further action. Again, we have the conflation of "there exists", and "for all". There exists artistic works that can be created from home, and there exists artists who can create them (and possibly even
You're exactly right. The problem is that it's easy to whine on an internet forum, but harder to actually generate real rage over most issues, when, deep down, you're living a comfortable life. That's not to say the issues aren't important, but while we're all essentially content, rage will remain only an idea.
This is probably because murder infringes upon another person's right to live.
Absolutely. But it's not a freedom (unless you conflate the meaning of "freedom" with "right"). Copyright infringement infringes on my burgeoning right to have access to a culture (as opposed to free access to a culture).
First, we don't have to grant ourselves freedoms, as they are already inherent.
Of course we do. Where do you think they come from? Do you think the big bang created them? Or do you think God created them?
Second, an artist is driven to create, regardless of whether or not he is compensated with money.
I can't accept that on your word alone. I'll need proof that there are no commercial artists who would stop creating once they stop being compensated. That will be difficult, since I'm pretty sure there are no such studies on the subject.
What do you think happens to these artists? They just live on in fairy land, creating and gaining sustenance from pure creativity? They have to get a job to support their habits, so even if they don't have any other hobbies that would trump creation, you must admit they'll have less time and energy to create. I would then imagine that that would have an adverse and significant effect on the quality and quantity of their works produced. And that doesn't even mention whether or not they'll bother to publish them.
We will never run out of new artworks to share, unless civilization as we know it collapses, and then that's only temporary.
Again, I'll need some evidence. Current art creation rates have been dependent, for years, on culture penetration. Current artists create so much and are so common, in part, because previous artists inspire them, and we are so saturated in culture. We stand to lose all that.
Sure, we used to create works before, so I guess will never technically run out of new works, but we could lose a vast, vast majority of them.
So it can all be solved by renaming it to "The Non-Pirate Bay"? Of course not.
Perhaps, but how long is "long term copyright"? Do you think that pirates wait some agreed, perfectly unbiased, fair amount of time before uploading a movie?
I think it's still ducking the ethical question. Neither "The mafiaa is teh evil" or "long-term copyrights is teh evil" answer the question of whether copyright is teh evil, or whether the actions of teh pirate bay are morally justifiable.
Yes. The pirate bay encourages users to use their services in a way that violates copyrights, and actively refuse to work with the media companies they encourage users to rip off. Google is the opposite. Sure they can't be perfect, but they try.
Yeah, it's pretty hard to see the distinction, because it's a little subtle.
Sure, we say we say we want legislation that prefers individuals over corporations, but at the same time, we like our corporations strong, our dollars strong, our big houses/apartments filled with expensive items, and our cars guzzling gas. The two have proved to be closely related over time, and as soon as all of that starts to slide, there will be real hell to pay, even from the apathetic, who will get up off their lounges once their cable and their internet doubles in price.
Slashdot Mirror
"Clearly innocent" is a matter for the courts to decide. Certainly not grounds for being declared a criminal organisation.
Based on what some guy on the internet considers fair, or based on them not upholding their end of a contract? Still, that's more of a civil matter between them and artists.
Proposing is not a crime and "getting a law passed" is a misnomer. It's certainly not a "usurpation of peoples' rights". It is, in effect, an offer to people as a whole to curtail certain fringe rights in exchange for protection against slump in copyrighted work production. Again, not the actions of a criminal organisation.
The RIAA's behaviour isn't criminal, and they aren't a criminal organisation. They actually do do good things, which I won't bother going through here. Their actions, however, serve to highlight problems within political and legal systems that can neither be solved nor aggravated through copyright law proposals.
... which can be said even more so about the subculture they're trying to eliminate. Better still, if that subculture is eliminated first, they'll stop (or at least tone it down a lot), and then we can focus on making them pay for their transgressions.
Really? What property of artists are the RIAA abusing? I believe they signed a contract that says the property I suspect you refer to is not their property at all.
The laws, correct? They're allowed to propose any law they want. Period.
Nope, I guess they aren't a criminal organisation after all. I guess emotive rhetoric and mod points don't make a guy correct.
I call it "copyright", because controlling distribution in this way is neither novel nor unintended. It's just artists exerting control over their works in exchange for creation. Same-ol', same-ol'.
I believe the boogieman du jour is the government, at least here on slashdot.
Most people I know would feel mightily ripped off to see a five people press a play button because...
... the purpose of a live performance is to hear them perform live (call me crazy). If I wanted to hear something pre-recorded, I would want a studio recording instead. I can take it home, and it ends up much cheaper, since I don't have to pay for their time while listening to their records. Basically it takes the worst elements from playing at home (music is not dynamic, there's no rapport between the musicians and their audience) and the worst elements of playing live (the music is played, inflexibly, from start to finish, it's expensive, and I can only listen once).
I don't know if you know this, but this thread was initially about abolishing copyright. I was talking about being constrained because live performances are suggested to replace recordings, so that musicians (but no mention of any other artists) can make money without copyright (so we can abolish it, and yaddah yaddah yaddah). The idea is that most artists won't bother investing in a high quality recording session, because they'd be creating something which competes with their live concerts, plus it costs them time and money to do so.
That's a little patronising, don't you think? I think the "targeted demographic" are perfectly capable of deciding what they enjoy. Besides, if those bands indeed push units better, won't they be the ones who survive when push comes to shove? It's not difficult to lip-synch, after all.
Pirate bay users would think that swarming in greater numbers will push their cause faster, wouldn't they? Typical.
I think this is what safe harbour is for. All the copyright holder has to do (and they do) is send Google a takedown notice and they'll generally comply. Try sending a takedown notice (or even a friendly request) to TPB and see what happens.
There's a delicate art to creating analogies. Identifying situations with similarities is the easy part. The real trick is identifying two situations without differences relevant to the situation. It's those differences that sink analogies.
For example, there is a difference between The Pirate Bay and Google, namely intent (as the OP and others have correctly identified). Intent makes all the difference when it comes to courts, and people in general. That means that analogies between TPB and Google will be rendered essentially meaningless.
Well that wraps things up. Goodnight everybody!
I agree with you; it's just that I misspoke. We do indeed have a sea of rights (I was talking about chaos being the ultimate freedom before), but to say any one of them is sacred without practical justification is bullshit. We restricted copying previously, so we would have to (re)grant copying as a right. The reason to do so is not some bullshit sanctity argument about the right being present since the evolution of the second man. Otherwise, we would also enshrine murder. The reason to (re)grant copying rights needs to be founded in practical terms.
Isn't it satisfying when 90% of the divide between two opposing opinions simply fall away? :)
We really need a really good estimate of exactly how much damage our culture is going to sustain. Right now it's very large and reasonably healthy, with the arguable exception of pop culture. Abolishing copyright, as you said, will have an adverse effect. Now, it seems reasonable that we can sustain an adverse effect in exchange for free access to what's left, but we must know exactly how much damage.
My doom and gloom is technically possible, and I have even brushed over some reasons why I think things have decent chance of really going that far south. I truly think that we stand to lose everything. Popular culture, fringe culture, even the guys already working for free from their basements, we stand to lose it all. Like I mentioned, artists will be forced to get a paying job and spend less time on their art, which will, in practical terms, mean less quantity, less quality, and less variety (since more expensive/more time-consuming works will become infeasible). As new works become increasingly, genuinely scarce, certain things will happen:
1) Expensive live tours will become very rare, very quickly, as people realise they can get music from home instantly for free.
2) People will stop idolising the rock star/film star, as the job transforms into working alone from home.
3) People will stop aiming to become a star, and will stop seeing major art-forms as outlets for their showmanship
4) Less people will become stars, which feeds back into the "less variety" and 1)
5) People will be less inspired by crappier and fewer artworks feeding again into 3) and 4)
As you can see, in this scenario, culture slides slowly towards insignificance. We take for granted what copyright has done for us already, and what copyright continues to do. We assume that we will always have artistic people vying to strut their stuff on stage, but the whole process is a vicious cycle. Sure, certain people will still have flashes of inspiration amidst all the drudgery, but exactly how many people are that creative so as to have an unprovoked, original idea?
I think you'll find that old works become old very quickly. Certain classics have withstood the test of time, but a vast majority have faded into obscurity. I mean, there are old works out there in the public domain, or if not, they're on sale for very low prices, yet people still seem to insist on spending comparatively gigantic amounts of money on new works. What does that say?
You may also note that people pay for trinkets, which explains the correlation between demand and supply.
But do they have the money to do so? After spending on instruments/tools, and paying for webspace, do they have the money? Things become seriously hard when the commercial value of what you're doing is sucked dry. (Yeah, yeah, I know, some people manage it.)
Besides, individual websites are an extremely poor way of distributing. No-one will know that you're there, so there won't be enough of a spark to generate word-of-mouth (assuming the work even has the potential to generate word-of-mouth). You would have to advertise, which costs big bucks. The only real way to distribute would be to go to a centralised site,
Fantastic. Like the word "newspeak", meaning "I can't think of an adequate rebuttal for that".
Last I checked, there were no corporate cronies behind me, and absolutely no-one who wants culture to be under the thumb of multi-nationals, or for copyrights to be perpetual. All I can see on this screen is the tragic small-minded ravings of someone who thinks that only shills disagree with him. Pathetic, really.
Nope, I meant exactly what I said. There's no distinguishing from popular culture and... well... unpopular culture here, except that popular culture is the only thing that has a chance of surviving post-copyright. I think you may be confusing emotional appeal with reason. It's a common mistake from people who like to call me a shill.
Did I consent to having the future of my (and my children's) culture ravaged for your gratification? Did the copyright holder consent to having the value of their investments (that they paid for out of pocket) pissed on for said gratification?
Oh no, nothing can be further from the truth! Intellectual property is just a term, and whatever you call what we now refer to as intellectual property is irrelevant. It comes down to two issues:
1) Is it OK, for the sake of culture, to restrict the private* information transactions of individuals, and
2) Are intellectual property laws necessary, or even capable of safeguarding culture
Calling it property or not is a tiny issue in semantics, and holds exactly zero stake in whether building "intellectual property" into law is A Good Thing.
* I use "private" very loosely, because most transactions of interest are quite public, others mostly fall into fair use.
Murdering is a freedom. Right to life is not. I'm not going to bang on about it any more, since we agree.
Forgive me. I honestly thought that commercial artists were a subset of artists as a whole.
It is, most certainly, an artwork, but not easily reproducible, nor possible to distribute. It's a pretty meaningless argument for "artists will be driven to create without income", since it's one single example trying to prove a huge, huge alleged trend, and it doesn't deal with distribution. No-one doubted that certain people will create certain things without income, but it is truly absurd to think that there won't be an adverse effect from dismantling the industry that we rely on so heavily today.
OK, just so you realise, you have shifted your argument (or so it seems) subtly from an absurd, but very relevant argument ("most artists will create") to a very sensible, but irrelevant argument ("some artists will create"). It's a change that is subtle in semantics, but is very significant in terms of concepts. So, for the record, here's my stance:
1) There are artists who will continue to create and distribute without money
2) Most artists will be forced to pack up their instruments and computers, and get a real job
In fact, this subtle semantic distinction serves very well for the anti-copyright argument.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of the paragraph, because I believe it would insult your intelligence to restate my already suitable arguments.
Penetration is more than distribution; it's also about creation. (How can you penetrate, without a penis? ;) The issue mostly relies on artists continuing to create.
Just as a side note, I was trying out a free music service that used bittorrent. I still supported copyright back then, and I was quite excited to get access to a whole lot of free music. The music was OK (I found one album I enjoyed, but it definitely needed some polish, and definitely couldn't be performed live), but the real problem was that most albums had no seeders, and thus listening was impossible. I found that with a vast majority of albums I tried, which was a real problem. That's not to say that effective, cheap internet distribution is not possible, but it does make the lesser known and less popular works are harder to get a hold of.
There's still the question of amounts. As I said, it's all well and good to say it will never die, but that doesn't preclude it from remaining deathly ill until further action. Again, we have the conflation of "there exists", and "for all". There exists artistic works that can be created from home, and there exists artists who can create them (and possibly even
Hey! I was taking responsibility for my actions before it was uncool!
And, of course, all the many, very good reasons why said law exists, don't forget.
(What, mods? I'm no more of a troll than the parent.)
You're exactly right. The problem is that it's easy to whine on an internet forum, but harder to actually generate real rage over most issues, when, deep down, you're living a comfortable life. That's not to say the issues aren't important, but while we're all essentially content, rage will remain only an idea.
And for electronic music?
(And let me suggest, don't look to the past for answers. ;)
Absolutely. I've noticed that too. It's one of the beauties of copyright. It's completely competitive with other business models.
Absolutely. But it's not a freedom (unless you conflate the meaning of "freedom" with "right"). Copyright infringement infringes on my burgeoning right to have access to a culture (as opposed to free access to a culture).
Of course we do. Where do you think they come from? Do you think the big bang created them? Or do you think God created them?
I can't accept that on your word alone. I'll need proof that there are no commercial artists who would stop creating once they stop being compensated. That will be difficult, since I'm pretty sure there are no such studies on the subject.
What do you think happens to these artists? They just live on in fairy land, creating and gaining sustenance from pure creativity? They have to get a job to support their habits, so even if they don't have any other hobbies that would trump creation, you must admit they'll have less time and energy to create. I would then imagine that that would have an adverse and significant effect on the quality and quantity of their works produced. And that doesn't even mention whether or not they'll bother to publish them.
Again, I'll need some evidence. Current art creation rates have been dependent, for years, on culture penetration. Current artists create so much and are so common, in part, because previous artists inspire them, and we are so saturated in culture. We stand to lose all that.
Sure, we used to create works before, so I guess will never technically run out of new works, but we could lose a vast, vast majority of them.
Perhaps, but how long is "long term copyright"? Do you think that pirates wait some agreed, perfectly unbiased, fair amount of time before uploading a movie?
I think it's still ducking the ethical question. Neither "The mafiaa is teh evil" or "long-term copyrights is teh evil" answer the question of whether copyright is teh evil, or whether the actions of teh pirate bay are morally justifiable.
Yes. The pirate bay encourages users to use their services in a way that violates copyrights, and actively refuse to work with the media companies they encourage users to rip off. Google is the opposite. Sure they can't be perfect, but they try.
Yeah, it's pretty hard to see the distinction, because it's a little subtle.
Sure, we say we say we want legislation that prefers individuals over corporations, but at the same time, we like our corporations strong, our dollars strong, our big houses/apartments filled with expensive items, and our cars guzzling gas. The two have proved to be closely related over time, and as soon as all of that starts to slide, there will be real hell to pay, even from the apathetic, who will get up off their lounges once their cable and their internet doubles in price.