When I got to step 3, I let the water slip through my fingers in order to pick up the blue dye dropper. None of the blue dye made it through my fingers. Do I lose?
It can't. It can, in pure theory, be invisible to everyone who legitimately uses the media. Of course, differentiating between fair use and, well, unfair use is the problem - a problem that DRM companies treat with all the subtlety of Godzilla chasing a freight train.
It's not an issue of choosing what to reward, it's an issue of reality. You have every right to try to sell blades of grass for $100 each, but why the hell would I buy one when there's millions of them lying around all over the place that I can just pick for free?
No, but that's the beauty of it! We can actually change reality in our favour. We can actually choose to make art's commercial value relatively accurately reflect contribution to society rather than just scarcity! It's from a set of laws called copyright (maybe you've heard of it). It makes it financially feasible to produce artworks that can be copied unlimitedly for a living. It rewards based on demand, not scarcity. Sure, it doesn't strictly follow free market principles, but that's because if we apply strict free market principles, it produces something very contrary to the goals of said principles. There's no need to dismiss change because the status quo is just "reality".
You're asking about copyright being necessary, but ignoring the more important question: necessary for what? Copyright's originally intended purpose differs from its current actual purpose. The purpose of copyright today is to guarantee virtually unlimited profit for companies that hoard copyrighted material. For that purpose, copyright is essential, and that's why most of our works are still copyright protected. The question is, is copyright necessary for the purpose that it was originally created to serve? That is open to debate.
I don't think copyright's purpose nowadays is to guarantee monopoly for companies. That's not why we keep copyrights. We keep them because they have so far been instrumental in building and maintaining our culture. We keep them, because without them, artists are not guaranteed anything for their hard work, even though their work maybe extremely popular, and may be enjoyed by many people. Even if they decide to transfer their copyrights to companies, without that initial bargaining chip, they'd be screwed. Companies and their monopolies are means to an end. I would think this all obvious, but there you go.
To be clear, I don't advocate abolishing copyright, although I find the idea interesting and I like hearing people's arguments in favour of it. I do, however, think it needs to go back to its original purpose.
Ha! You're behind the times, my friend! The whole of Slashdot used to be like that! I'm not a particularly senior member, but I do remember a time, a while ago, when I posted on a copyright thread, making arguments against people in favour of abolishing copyrights (much like I do now), and I had a reply telling me coldly that I was making strawman arguments, that "nobody actually believes that copyrights should be abolished" (or something along those lines). Well, it wasn't true then. People weren't being modded up for those beliefs yet, but there were a growing number of people holding those beliefs. At the time, it was people with opinions like yours (and mine for that matter - I agree with you) that were being modded up. It was like slashdot itself had its own opinion, and you could watch it go from the opinion that copyright was too powerful (but necessary), to curiously considering abolishing copyrights, to being adamantly against copyrights. Observing this trend was the single precipitating factor in my believing the concept of groupthink. Now I realise just how important it is not to read just from the top layer of slashdot, but make an effort to read posts with lower scores, or just other sources altogether.
The system benefits certain people and so it tends to self-perpetuate.
Yeah, it benefits artists. Those people whose work you seem to enjoy regularly. They actually do get certain benefits in exchange for providing so many people with enjoyment. How many of them do you think will stick around (particularly the many poor ones) if all they have to look forward to is a 70% or so cut in pay, and an ungrateful public?
If a person wants to own many of the classics, they have to pay thousands of dollars for works made decades in the past.
That's evidence that copyright law needs tweaking (in term length), rather than replacing. Or maybe not, since those classics are still quite valuable, and a collection that big is worth a few thousand dollars.
A culture in which people can listen to, learn from, and build off of previous musical works at no cost would be vastly more creatively productive.
And it's an all too common (and convenient) fallacy to say that this isn't the case under copyright. You can listen to whatever you want, so long as you pay for it, or go through one of the many, many, many legitimate free channels for music. You can learn and build off the work for free.
We have full time bloggers who give away their words, so why not full time online music makers?
Or movie makers too? I'm sure that google ads can pay to make blockbuster movies, right? Get real. Blogging is easy. It doesn't require all your time, it requires no extraordinary start-up costs, and you view the ads while reading. Even then, it's an extremely mean living. You need a lot of followers to get any kind of serious money, and consequently, there are very few (if any) truly full-time bloggers.
It's more of a hobby for most people. Think about the average quality of a random blog for a second. That average quality is what we get from enthusiastic amateurs, who really aren't as good as they want to be. Get rid of copyright, and the world of music and movies will become like that. There will be a few skilled professionals and a few more skilled amateurs, and a whole lot of poorly made crap that only small niches will even look at.
Proof that there would be no shortage of new music if copyright expired? Myspace.com. Any large city's music scene. Many of those bands are hoping to make it big, but they also know the chances are slim. And yet, they make music anyway. There are plenty of motivations for making music besides the opportunity to sell physical copies of your recorded sounds.
What if the culture that copyright has provided us is subsidising the free music scene? The music created in those scenes are hardly original (in the very purest sense of the word), so the inspiration has to come from somewhere. Now, it could be that there has been a long line of free music that inspires itself, but far more likely is that copyrighted works have heavily influenced those bands. Without our saturation in culture, who's to say whether or not people will still be inspired enough to create music, say 10 years down the track, when our volume of new works is cut to 5-10% of what it originally was? Just another thing we have to prove won't happen if we want to ditch copyright.
... for his calm, rational, and comprehensive rebuttal against a post that embodies none of these qualities, and yet still manages to score higher for some reason.
If you want to paid, provide something to people that is in limited supply.
Why? Why should we allow that? We have to decide what we will reward as a society, and while some people advocate rewarding the useful and the entertaining, you seem to be for rewarding the scarce. Why can't we simply allow people to be paid for something that, while it won't be scarce a few minutes after creation, it is still beneficial?
We've reached the point where the supply is virtually limitless. If copyright was no longer valid, there would be no shortage of new bands and recordings.
Proof please. We're not going to abandon copyright, the thing that has seen us through our cultural boom, the thing that may well be the singularly largest contributing factor to said boom, and the thing that may hold the key to our continued cultural wealth, without damn good evidence that it won't do damage. If copyright is so unnecessary, how come most of our works are still copyright protected? How come those new bands who don't need to make a living off music haven't already stepped up to the plate, and blasted the hell out of commercial bands? This question, and many, many more, you'll have to answer before anything is done.
You see, too many people think that just because they created something, they deserve to be paid for it.
I think you'll find that to be incorrect if you actually talk to people who supposedly think that. It's a common misunderstanding, arising from the fact that it's far more elegant to say "artists deserve money for their creations" than to say the more correct "artists deserve to make money if people find their art enjoyable/useful/whatever else, rather have their sales forcibly cannibalised by free versions of their own work".
Good for you! I'd like to add that, to really demonstrate our collective independence from copyright, we refuse to buy, download, distribute, or otherwise deal in any copyrighted material, including, but certainly not limited to, licensed media that rely on copyright to work (like GPLed software). That'll show those Big Media fat cats and the government how much we need copyright!
But don't you get it? A copy serves as a replacement for a physical CD or sale. A large lot of people downloading a CD is mostly indicative of consumer interest/demand, not the cause of it. Out of those million, many of them would have considered buying the CD, and out of those, many of those may have decided to fork over the money for it (especially if they didn't have more pirated media to fall back on).
"Propriety" and "patented" are there to show you that they're the only game in town with this technology, and that you can feel secure in buying from them without having to do anything like compare to other vendors, or anything else the intelligent consumer is supposed to do.
... this doesn't sound too unreasonable. An encryption key isn't that different from a physical key. If the courts can demand one, why shouldn't they be able to demand the other under similar circumstance?. Certainly calling this totalitarianism (as certain tags do) is overreacting.
First, let me be clear. I am not arguing against copyright in principle. I am arguing against the extreme copyright that we have today.
OK, that does clear some things up, and leaves my argument a bit in the lurch. Whoops!
Jamie Thomas wasn't a scapegoat? Absolutely she was.
I was thinking of a scapegoat as in someone that people decide to punish for all their crimes. By punishing that person, they are supposed to be absolved of their own crimes. That's what separates scapegoats from random enforcement.
Thousands of Canadians (in a country a tenth the size of the U.S.) wrote to their representatives within a period of weeks demanding consultation. Many in the media misrepresented our opposition and the law. The system is fairly well broken, and not only in Canada. This argument is just plain weak.
You accuse me of idealism, but let's think about this rationally and cynically for a second. Which would your average politician prefer? A big bag of money that he can only use in political advertising, or a job that affords him power, wealth, and the opportunity to actually use those big bags of money? Political lobby money is all well and good, so long as you have a job, otherwise it's worth diddly squat. Sure, the system doesn't work the way you'd want it if "thousands" of people out of over 33 million people complain, but if the population were actually interested in repealing the DMCA, then they would. Lobby money can't buy your vote.
And even if you're right, and somehow the system still manages to (somehow) stonewall voters, attacking copyright is the wrong approach. What you should be doing is concentrating on the issue directly, perhaps citing copyright as an example. For now, I suggest go with copyright, and start coming up with better political systems.
Say that money comes from the pockets of 300 million people, who lose $10 each. Who is going to win that political battle?
More importantly, who is going to lose $10 each? If anything, 300 million will end up willingly trading their money for copies of whatever entertainment that gets published using the surplus profits from tighter copyrights (not that I condone them).
Your scenario of abolishing copyright is unrealistic.
My scenario? Ha! If only. I thought that's where you were coming from, but obviously I was mistaken.
What we actually face is a question of whether to expand the law. If we fail to do so, there will be no sudden collapse.
Just for the record I never suggested that. I was advocating that we don't do away with copyrights, nothing more, nothing less (well, perhaps just a little less).
Your scenario is wrong. The vast majority support taxes.
Yeah, now they do. Now that they actually rely on taxes for many of the things we take for granted. Before, when taxation law was the new kid on the block, do you really think that just about everyone was for it? Of course, now we accept taxes as part of our society. We are educated about what tax dollars go towards (generally), and that we can all expect to pay them when we're older. If only we could have something similar with copyright. Unfortunately, copyright is a slightly harder concept to explain, since it requires a little informal knowledge of economics to grasp, but you get my point. If copyright has time to "soak in", we, as a society, will be more aware of its benefits, and the harms of breaking it, and eventually it will be supported. It's hitting a particularly rough patch, because a) it's new, b) property law hasn't changed significantly nor needed to change significantly in many generations, c) it's more difficult to understand, and d) it gets temporarily in the way of what people want.
Aha! I nice lengthy, meaty reply! I like that in a post!
Laws don't emerge from nothing.
Neither did this one. This arose from a need of the people (the supply of new media) rather than just a ceremonial formalising of already common behaviour.
If the law accords with norms, little enforcement will be needed because people will regulate themselves. We don't need to enforce anti-theft laws against most people because most people are not thieves. We seldom need to enforce laws against murder because most people are not murderers.
What you say makes a lot of sense in terms of the history of our laws, but it seems so impotent to actually do anything good. We could equivalently say that we don't allow murdering or stealing because we have deemed them both morally wrong, or bad for the workings of society, or a bunch of other rational. There's also a chicken-egg aspect to it, where we don't actually know what prompted these laws: the need for the laws, or the behaviour that sprung from the need for the laws.
If the law is detached from social norms and it cannot be enforced, then it is an unjust law.
Well, copyright isn't actually detached from social norms. There are plenty of people who respect the fact that artists deserve some money for their work. Copyright can also be enforced, not for just a "few scapegoats", but for a rate comparable to most crimes. All we need is a little more enforcement. Much of the activity happens on a just a few P2P networks. They're mostly public, so it wouldn't be difficult for an enforcement agent to monitor them and cut down on a significant portion of piracy. So, I guess it doesn't really fit the definition of unjust law, huh?
That is the situation we have with the attempt to apply copyright to the private activities of individuals.
P2P networks are not private. If they were, then over half the problem would essentially be solved. If copyright infringement only happened in private, then at least the rate of growth would be stunted to your close friends, rather than thousands of anonymous people. People only have so much free time, let alone for constantly copying and distributing. You at least might get some moral feedback too. If you ask someone for a copy of their CD over the phone or face to face, they can express any moral doubts they have over it, and give you a chance to consider your own moral position. It's a vast improvement all round.
Many (I suspect most) of those who believe they respect a reasonable law in fact break it - and would in fact be astonished to learn its true scope.
Everyone breaks laws, if they're held to the letter. For example, I, not too long ago, found a pen on the ground. The law says I should return it to police and wait a certain period for someone to claim it, after which the pen becomes mine. By taking it, I broke the law. I don't care, the owner of the pen doesn't care, the police don't care, the general public doesn't care. Does this mean I can pull a bank heist with the same result? No. Does this mean the law is unjust? Certainly not. Like most laws, copyright can't specify all the extenuating circumstances, minimum damages, etc. That's for the courts to do.
What we have is an attempt by a narrow sector of interests to forcibly overturn existing social norms by crafting unjust laws and applying unreasonable penalties to a few scapegoats.
OK, I let it slip the first time, but not this time. They're not scapegoats. By persecuting them, this does not absolve anyone else of their crimes. They are just the few people who pirated and paid the price.
What we have is an attempt by a narrow sector of interests to forcibly overturn existing social norms by crafting unjust laws and applying unreasonable penalties to a few scapegoats.
Call me a dewey eyed optimist, but I think that both the democrats and republicans will do something for the recession. It won't stop it, it won't save people from a lot of pain, but it will save people from a lot more pain than they normally would under a candidate who did nothing, or under a candidate who took the time to pass some anti-corporate legislature that, while admirably promoting the rights of the citizen, will in effect encourage multinationals to take their business elsewhere, which sinks the economy even deeper into its hole.
I find your user name to be suspiciously relevant.
Right. Since when have opinions delicately put and sensitively reasoned been flamebait?
Any "supply" with respect to digital media is, in large part, a matter of artificial scarcity, so I find it inane to speak of protecting the supply; in a way, you are begging the question by not addressing the "why" and "to what extent" of the artificial scarcity.
New media is genuinely scarce. That's what copyright safeguards. If we were all happy to live with our current body of works, then there truly wouldn't be any scarcity, and we truly wouldn't need copyright. However, this is not the case. Without copyright, a new work goes from being scarce to not at all scarce in a matter of minutes from hitting the shelves. Who would want to invest in a business venture like that?
Let's see here - a few more CD's means a few more purchases, with little effort involved. Net gain for the economy. On the other hand, paying salaries to the Copyright Cops and the Copyright Czar to bust a woman in a wheelchair and her 10 year old daughter living on a meager income with little property... equals a net loss for the economy.
Ignoring the snide remark for the moment, perhaps there's more at stake here than just "a few CDs". Maybe there are actually hundreds of millions of CD and DVD sales that never happened, because people could subsist on pirated media? Perhaps even much, much more overseas? Perhaps there's enough to offset the costs. Think about it. If the vast array of entertainment were never to fall into the hands of avid pirates, imagine how much they would buy in order to fill the gap. Certain people can't afford to buy too much, but others can. If half the people in the US pirated, and they would have bought, on average, 2 CDs/DVDs over the course of the year, that's 350 million CDs. At about $15-20 a pop, well, you're looking at up to 7 billion per year from the US alone! All numbers directly from my ass, of course.
I don't recall these curves taking into account pirated copies of the copyrighted goods.
That makes sense. The unique problems of piracy are relatively new, so your education may not be up to date with present times.
Face it, if there's no profit in publishing songs, movies, tv shows, software, or books, then why are they in the business of doing so, and why do they need increased taxpayer subsidized "protection"?
Y'know, for all your inflammatory questions, either they don't make sense in the context, or they have an easy, direct answer. This is a case of the latter. Let me break it down for you: no protection = no profit, protection = profit. It's not normally profitable, which is unusual for something in such high demand, but thanks to protection, profits and incentives can actually more or less match demand and contribution to society.
When hundreds of millions of children can "manufacture and distribute" copies of works more easily than they can tie their shoes, with no cost to themselves, then the only way to stop it is with a government powerful enough to know when they do it and stop them or prosecute them.
(emphasis mine)
That's the same way to stop any crime! We need a global totalitarian state in order stop crime. Fortunately, stopping crime is not our practical aim, rather to curb it as much as is feasible. Similarly with piracy, we don't need a totalitarian state, just some random enforcement (just like cops on the street) to catch a few people, and remind the rest the consequences of their actions.
By making stupid laws that should not and will not be obeyed and cannot be enforced we train the citizen from his youth to scoff at the law.
Laws have to be introduced sometime. We can't just make a bunch of rules at the dawn of civilisation and expect us to live by them forever onwards. Circumstances change, and so do our needs. Right now, the fact that this law is disobeyed so frequently is not just evidence that the law is stupid, but also that the law is so necessary. We need (read: we really really want) our music, our movies, and our video games. We want it so much we will flit around the law to get more and more of it. Surely laws that safeguard the supply of such luxuries should be passed and enforced?
As for enforcement, it's not that hard. Regularly monitor P2P networks. That will cut down most anonymous sharing, and it can be done mostly automatically, like a speed camera that checks file names and puts them on a "suspicious" list. Or it could be done manually by a person or two. It wouldn't have to be that costly, but enough to put some real risk in piracy.
rather than trying to correct problems with the US banking system, they've instead decided that the US's biggest concern is people downloading MP3s.
Well, no, not exactly. They know it's a problem. They don't know what they're doing, but they know it's a problem. They also know people downloading MP3s that could have been bought and paid for is also a problem, a problem not entirely disconnected from the US economy.
Cracking down heavily on IP actually harms the economy.
How exactly do you figure that? If the overhead costs are kept low enough, then increased sales should make up the cost.
I have a HUGE DVD (and now blu-ray) collection, 95% of which are things I initially copied.
Really? Well, that's impressive. Unfortunately, the impulse to buy after possession makes you the exception, not the rule. But hey, maybe we can lobby to put an exception clause for you in copyright law.
It may reduce the chance that it will be bought on a macro level, but that just goes back what you call a strawman argument. "Would have bought it" = "lost sale" = "stealing."
That part's not a strawman. I would, have, and just did make that argument. The part that's a strawman is that a single copy = lost sale in a one-to-one sense.
... blah, blah, blah,... Britteny Spears... blah, blah, blah... and people are convinced they should spend $20 on her new album.
Well, so long as they enjoy it, who really cares? If what she and her "team" (for lack of a better word) does is selling, and people are enjoying it, it's worth something. The fact that you and me don't appreciate it just means that we probably shouldn't buy it, nothing more. It does not give us, for example, the right to copy it, nor does it provide us with an adequate reason to sink copyrights. To do that, you have to prove that out of all the millions upon millions of artworks sold today, next to none of them are any good, or that next to none of them required copyright to be made, both extremely difficult things to prove.
Only copyright makes such a shallow, petty, worthless, drivel-producing paradigm possible, let alone profitable.
Only copyright makes several things, many of them good, possible.
If there were no copyright, Brittney Spears would be giving lap dances for $20 a pop. Nothing more.
Britteny Spears could well be profitable. If we did get rid of copyright, the RIAA won't just throw in the towel. They will adapt to their new life of poverty. The first thing they will do is milk their popular singers for all they're worth. Their revenue may be sawed into a tenth of what it was originally, but revenue is revenue. The brand of Britteny Spears (and whatever other pop sensations) will be what help them ride through the hard times. Sure, things will be different, since they wouldn't be able to afford to put all the polish that they put on normally, but it'll be essentially the same music and the same lyrics. Who will really be dying is the less mainstream artists. The ones who can't pull in many sales. The one who is a "risky choice", because he's relatively unknown, which sparks people to be hesitant about spending money on his album, and preferring to pirate instead. All the little guys will be dropped from their labels to either try (and probably fail) to make it on their own, or go get a job in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
When I got to step 3, I let the water slip through my fingers in order to pick up the blue dye dropper. None of the blue dye made it through my fingers. Do I lose?
It can't. It can, in pure theory, be invisible to everyone who legitimately uses the media. Of course, differentiating between fair use and, well, unfair use is the problem - a problem that DRM companies treat with all the subtlety of Godzilla chasing a freight train.
Ah! Well put, and intelligently reasoned. Now I remember why I'm your fan!
No, but that's the beauty of it! We can actually change reality in our favour. We can actually choose to make art's commercial value relatively accurately reflect contribution to society rather than just scarcity! It's from a set of laws called copyright (maybe you've heard of it). It makes it financially feasible to produce artworks that can be copied unlimitedly for a living. It rewards based on demand, not scarcity. Sure, it doesn't strictly follow free market principles, but that's because if we apply strict free market principles, it produces something very contrary to the goals of said principles. There's no need to dismiss change because the status quo is just "reality".
I don't think copyright's purpose nowadays is to guarantee monopoly for companies. That's not why we keep copyrights. We keep them because they have so far been instrumental in building and maintaining our culture. We keep them, because without them, artists are not guaranteed anything for their hard work, even though their work maybe extremely popular, and may be enjoyed by many people. Even if they decide to transfer their copyrights to companies, without that initial bargaining chip, they'd be screwed. Companies and their monopolies are means to an end. I would think this all obvious, but there you go.
Ha! You're behind the times, my friend! The whole of Slashdot used to be like that! I'm not a particularly senior member, but I do remember a time, a while ago, when I posted on a copyright thread, making arguments against people in favour of abolishing copyrights (much like I do now), and I had a reply telling me coldly that I was making strawman arguments, that "nobody actually believes that copyrights should be abolished" (or something along those lines). Well, it wasn't true then. People weren't being modded up for those beliefs yet, but there were a growing number of people holding those beliefs. At the time, it was people with opinions like yours (and mine for that matter - I agree with you) that were being modded up. It was like slashdot itself had its own opinion, and you could watch it go from the opinion that copyright was too powerful (but necessary), to curiously considering abolishing copyrights, to being adamantly against copyrights. Observing this trend was the single precipitating factor in my believing the concept of groupthink. Now I realise just how important it is not to read just from the top layer of slashdot, but make an effort to read posts with lower scores, or just other sources altogether.
Yeah, it benefits artists. Those people whose work you seem to enjoy regularly. They actually do get certain benefits in exchange for providing so many people with enjoyment. How many of them do you think will stick around (particularly the many poor ones) if all they have to look forward to is a 70% or so cut in pay, and an ungrateful public?
That's evidence that copyright law needs tweaking (in term length), rather than replacing. Or maybe not, since those classics are still quite valuable, and a collection that big is worth a few thousand dollars.
And it's an all too common (and convenient) fallacy to say that this isn't the case under copyright. You can listen to whatever you want, so long as you pay for it, or go through one of the many, many, many legitimate free channels for music. You can learn and build off the work for free.
Or movie makers too? I'm sure that google ads can pay to make blockbuster movies, right? Get real. Blogging is easy. It doesn't require all your time, it requires no extraordinary start-up costs, and you view the ads while reading. Even then, it's an extremely mean living. You need a lot of followers to get any kind of serious money, and consequently, there are very few (if any) truly full-time bloggers.
It's more of a hobby for most people. Think about the average quality of a random blog for a second. That average quality is what we get from enthusiastic amateurs, who really aren't as good as they want to be. Get rid of copyright, and the world of music and movies will become like that. There will be a few skilled professionals and a few more skilled amateurs, and a whole lot of poorly made crap that only small niches will even look at.
What if the culture that copyright has provided us is subsidising the free music scene? The music created in those scenes are hardly original (in the very purest sense of the word), so the inspiration has to come from somewhere. Now, it could be that there has been a long line of free music that inspires itself, but far more likely is that copyrighted works have heavily influenced those bands. Without our saturation in culture, who's to say whether or not people will still be inspired enough to create music, say 10 years down the track, when our volume of new works is cut to 5-10% of what it originally was? Just another thing we have to prove won't happen if we want to ditch copyright.
... for his calm, rational, and comprehensive rebuttal against a post that embodies none of these qualities, and yet still manages to score higher for some reason.
Why? Why should we allow that? We have to decide what we will reward as a society, and while some people advocate rewarding the useful and the entertaining, you seem to be for rewarding the scarce. Why can't we simply allow people to be paid for something that, while it won't be scarce a few minutes after creation, it is still beneficial?
Proof please. We're not going to abandon copyright, the thing that has seen us through our cultural boom, the thing that may well be the singularly largest contributing factor to said boom, and the thing that may hold the key to our continued cultural wealth, without damn good evidence that it won't do damage. If copyright is so unnecessary, how come most of our works are still copyright protected? How come those new bands who don't need to make a living off music haven't already stepped up to the plate, and blasted the hell out of commercial bands? This question, and many, many more, you'll have to answer before anything is done.
I think you'll find that to be incorrect if you actually talk to people who supposedly think that. It's a common misunderstanding, arising from the fact that it's far more elegant to say "artists deserve money for their creations" than to say the more correct "artists deserve to make money if people find their art enjoyable/useful/whatever else, rather have their sales forcibly cannibalised by free versions of their own work".
Good for you! I'd like to add that, to really demonstrate our collective independence from copyright, we refuse to buy, download, distribute, or otherwise deal in any copyrighted material, including, but certainly not limited to, licensed media that rely on copyright to work (like GPLed software). That'll show those Big Media fat cats and the government how much we need copyright!
But don't you get it? A copy serves as a replacement for a physical CD or sale. A large lot of people downloading a CD is mostly indicative of consumer interest/demand, not the cause of it. Out of those million, many of them would have considered buying the CD, and out of those, many of those may have decided to fork over the money for it (especially if they didn't have more pirated media to fall back on).
That's exactly the issue. Stealing a CD is taking from the CD's owner. Copying a CD is taking value from the copyright owner.
So what you're saying is, wikipedia is wrong, and you can't believe the truth? Got it. ;)
"Propriety" and "patented" are there to show you that they're the only game in town with this technology, and that you can feel secure in buying from them without having to do anything like compare to other vendors, or anything else the intelligent consumer is supposed to do.
... this doesn't sound too unreasonable. An encryption key isn't that different from a physical key. If the courts can demand one, why shouldn't they be able to demand the other under similar circumstance?. Certainly calling this totalitarianism (as certain tags do) is overreacting.
OK, that does clear some things up, and leaves my argument a bit in the lurch. Whoops!
I was thinking of a scapegoat as in someone that people decide to punish for all their crimes. By punishing that person, they are supposed to be absolved of their own crimes. That's what separates scapegoats from random enforcement.
You accuse me of idealism, but let's think about this rationally and cynically for a second. Which would your average politician prefer? A big bag of money that he can only use in political advertising, or a job that affords him power, wealth, and the opportunity to actually use those big bags of money? Political lobby money is all well and good, so long as you have a job, otherwise it's worth diddly squat. Sure, the system doesn't work the way you'd want it if "thousands" of people out of over 33 million people complain, but if the population were actually interested in repealing the DMCA, then they would. Lobby money can't buy your vote.
And even if you're right, and somehow the system still manages to (somehow) stonewall voters, attacking copyright is the wrong approach. What you should be doing is concentrating on the issue directly, perhaps citing copyright as an example. For now, I suggest go with copyright, and start coming up with better political systems.
More importantly, who is going to lose $10 each? If anything, 300 million will end up willingly trading their money for copies of whatever entertainment that gets published using the surplus profits from tighter copyrights (not that I condone them).
My scenario? Ha! If only. I thought that's where you were coming from, but obviously I was mistaken.
Just for the record I never suggested that. I was advocating that we don't do away with copyrights, nothing more, nothing less (well, perhaps just a little less).
Yeah, now they do. Now that they actually rely on taxes for many of the things we take for granted. Before, when taxation law was the new kid on the block, do you really think that just about everyone was for it? Of course, now we accept taxes as part of our society. We are educated about what tax dollars go towards (generally), and that we can all expect to pay them when we're older. If only we could have something similar with copyright. Unfortunately, copyright is a slightly harder concept to explain, since it requires a little informal knowledge of economics to grasp, but you get my point. If copyright has time to "soak in", we, as a society, will be more aware of its benefits, and the harms of breaking it, and eventually it will be supported. It's hitting a particularly rough patch, because a) it's new, b) property law hasn't changed significantly nor needed to change significantly in many generations, c) it's more difficult to understand, and d) it gets temporarily in the way of what people want.
Aha! I nice lengthy, meaty reply! I like that in a post!
Neither did this one. This arose from a need of the people (the supply of new media) rather than just a ceremonial formalising of already common behaviour.
What you say makes a lot of sense in terms of the history of our laws, but it seems so impotent to actually do anything good. We could equivalently say that we don't allow murdering or stealing because we have deemed them both morally wrong, or bad for the workings of society, or a bunch of other rational. There's also a chicken-egg aspect to it, where we don't actually know what prompted these laws: the need for the laws, or the behaviour that sprung from the need for the laws.
Well, copyright isn't actually detached from social norms. There are plenty of people who respect the fact that artists deserve some money for their work. Copyright can also be enforced, not for just a "few scapegoats", but for a rate comparable to most crimes. All we need is a little more enforcement. Much of the activity happens on a just a few P2P networks. They're mostly public, so it wouldn't be difficult for an enforcement agent to monitor them and cut down on a significant portion of piracy. So, I guess it doesn't really fit the definition of unjust law, huh?
P2P networks are not private. If they were, then over half the problem would essentially be solved. If copyright infringement only happened in private, then at least the rate of growth would be stunted to your close friends, rather than thousands of anonymous people. People only have so much free time, let alone for constantly copying and distributing. You at least might get some moral feedback too. If you ask someone for a copy of their CD over the phone or face to face, they can express any moral doubts they have over it, and give you a chance to consider your own moral position. It's a vast improvement all round.
Everyone breaks laws, if they're held to the letter. For example, I, not too long ago, found a pen on the ground. The law says I should return it to police and wait a certain period for someone to claim it, after which the pen becomes mine. By taking it, I broke the law. I don't care, the owner of the pen doesn't care, the police don't care, the general public doesn't care. Does this mean I can pull a bank heist with the same result? No. Does this mean the law is unjust? Certainly not. Like most laws, copyright can't specify all the extenuating circumstances, minimum damages, etc. That's for the courts to do.
OK, I let it slip the first time, but not this time. They're not scapegoats. By persecuting them, this does not absolve anyone else of their crimes. They are just the few people who pirated and paid the price.
Call me a dewey eyed optimist, but I think that both the democrats and republicans will do something for the recession. It won't stop it, it won't save people from a lot of pain, but it will save people from a lot more pain than they normally would under a candidate who did nothing, or under a candidate who took the time to pass some anti-corporate legislature that, while admirably promoting the rights of the citizen, will in effect encourage multinationals to take their business elsewhere, which sinks the economy even deeper into its hole.
(Wow, long sentence!)
You too, if possible! :)
Right. Since when have opinions delicately put and sensitively reasoned been flamebait?
New media is genuinely scarce. That's what copyright safeguards. If we were all happy to live with our current body of works, then there truly wouldn't be any scarcity, and we truly wouldn't need copyright. However, this is not the case. Without copyright, a new work goes from being scarce to not at all scarce in a matter of minutes from hitting the shelves. Who would want to invest in a business venture like that?
Ignoring the snide remark for the moment, perhaps there's more at stake here than just "a few CDs". Maybe there are actually hundreds of millions of CD and DVD sales that never happened, because people could subsist on pirated media? Perhaps even much, much more overseas? Perhaps there's enough to offset the costs. Think about it. If the vast array of entertainment were never to fall into the hands of avid pirates, imagine how much they would buy in order to fill the gap. Certain people can't afford to buy too much, but others can. If half the people in the US pirated, and they would have bought, on average, 2 CDs/DVDs over the course of the year, that's 350 million CDs. At about $15-20 a pop, well, you're looking at up to 7 billion per year from the US alone! All numbers directly from my ass, of course.
That makes sense. The unique problems of piracy are relatively new, so your education may not be up to date with present times.
Y'know, for all your inflammatory questions, either they don't make sense in the context, or they have an easy, direct answer. This is a case of the latter. Let me break it down for you: no protection = no profit, protection = profit. It's not normally profitable, which is unusual for something in such high demand, but thanks to protection, profits and incentives can actually more or less match demand and contribution to society.
(emphasis mine)
That's the same way to stop any crime! We need a global totalitarian state in order stop crime. Fortunately, stopping crime is not our practical aim, rather to curb it as much as is feasible. Similarly with piracy, we don't need a totalitarian state, just some random enforcement (just like cops on the street) to catch a few people, and remind the rest the consequences of their actions.
Laws have to be introduced sometime. We can't just make a bunch of rules at the dawn of civilisation and expect us to live by them forever onwards. Circumstances change, and so do our needs. Right now, the fact that this law is disobeyed so frequently is not just evidence that the law is stupid, but also that the law is so necessary. We need (read: we really really want) our music, our movies, and our video games. We want it so much we will flit around the law to get more and more of it. Surely laws that safeguard the supply of such luxuries should be passed and enforced?
As for enforcement, it's not that hard. Regularly monitor P2P networks. That will cut down most anonymous sharing, and it can be done mostly automatically, like a speed camera that checks file names and puts them on a "suspicious" list. Or it could be done manually by a person or two. It wouldn't have to be that costly, but enough to put some real risk in piracy.
I'm sure there's at least one independent candidate hell bent on bringing down the multinational corporation based US economy. Don't despair!
Well, no, not exactly. They know it's a problem. They don't know what they're doing, but they know it's a problem. They also know people downloading MP3s that could have been bought and paid for is also a problem, a problem not entirely disconnected from the US economy.
How exactly do you figure that? If the overhead costs are kept low enough, then increased sales should make up the cost.
Really? Well, that's impressive. Unfortunately, the impulse to buy after possession makes you the exception, not the rule. But hey, maybe we can lobby to put an exception clause for you in copyright law.
That part's not a strawman. I would, have, and just did make that argument. The part that's a strawman is that a single copy = lost sale in a one-to-one sense.
Well, so long as they enjoy it, who really cares? If what she and her "team" (for lack of a better word) does is selling, and people are enjoying it, it's worth something. The fact that you and me don't appreciate it just means that we probably shouldn't buy it, nothing more. It does not give us, for example, the right to copy it, nor does it provide us with an adequate reason to sink copyrights. To do that, you have to prove that out of all the millions upon millions of artworks sold today, next to none of them are any good, or that next to none of them required copyright to be made, both extremely difficult things to prove.
Only copyright makes several things, many of them good, possible.
Britteny Spears could well be profitable. If we did get rid of copyright, the RIAA won't just throw in the towel. They will adapt to their new life of poverty. The first thing they will do is milk their popular singers for all they're worth. Their revenue may be sawed into a tenth of what it was originally, but revenue is revenue. The brand of Britteny Spears (and whatever other pop sensations) will be what help them ride through the hard times. Sure, things will be different, since they wouldn't be able to afford to put all the polish that they put on normally, but it'll be essentially the same music and the same lyrics. Who will really be dying is the less mainstream artists. The ones who can't pull in many sales. The one who is a "risky choice", because he's relatively unknown, which sparks people to be hesitant about spending money on his album, and preferring to pirate instead. All the little guys will be dropped from their labels to either try (and probably fail) to make it on their own, or go get a job in the real world.
As a matter of fact, I actually have already implemented two of those suggestions. I might just give the other two a try, thanks. :)