Luck, if you have half a brain, shouldn't even enter into it. By the first, or at most second, warning any sane person would've stopped doing it. You'd have to be pretty unlucky, but also supremely stupid if the first two warnings don't get through to you.
Copyright... was meant to make publishing possible (and empiric studies suggest that even then, authors that distributed works without copyright often made more money).
Exactly. Even though it didn't help artists in the short term, it was obviously perceived that information transmission was becoming easier and easier, flows of communication were becoming free-er and free-er, and the future of art as a business was becoming dimmer and dimmer. It was an impressive bit of lawmaking, especially since not only did it try to head off future problems, but it did it in such an elegant, cost-effective way.
About money and motivation - copyright is not required for those. Performances make money.
Performances of what? I happen to like artistic, carefully constructed electronic pieces of music, but they can't easily or effectively be performed live. They're not a true performing art. What then? Are my tastes going to be limited here on in to variations of two guitarists, a singer, and a drummer? What about books? They're fine now because physical books are a pain to copy, and e-readers are expensive, but that will inevitably change. What then? Is literature going to be limited to private readings?
The problem here is that you are approaching the financing of art in a piecemeal way. This has the major disadvantage of being completely inflexible, which is a death sentence in our modern world of rapidly revolving technology. Every time a new market becomes feasible, or an old market stops being feasible, then you have to redesign the system, or accept that art will never evolve again. If you thought the RIAA was a reactionary old dinosaur, wait until you see the music business after copyright. It will be a dinosaur that became extinct long ago, and for good reason.
Maybe less money, who knows. But consider that even if significantly less work is created in total, the fact that it is all public domain as far as people are concerned, the net effect is that people will have and be exposed to more culture. This, combined with the fact that anyone will be able to make incremental improvements and derivative works may actually mean that we will have the best of both worlds (more culture for everyone, AND more creation).
If we abolished copyrights, the best you could hope for is all copyrights be terminated retroactively, and effective immediately. Then you'd have a large flood of new works populating the public domain, and people would indeed have more access to culture, at least, in the short term. Artists wouldn't create nearly as many works, but people would be relatively happy, until, slowly, we all get tired of the same old offerings. I know this would happen, because if this weren't the trend, we'd all be enjoying classic artworks for free, and the artistic industries would be out of business. When people reach that stage, they'll have nowhere to turn for their culture. It'll have stagnated and failed to evolve. No other country would be prepared to export their culture to the US, due to the lack of copyright protections. You'd be sent right back to the dark ages in a generation.
History proves that there is money to be made by culture even without or with extremely limited copyrights.
History doesn't prove jack shit about copyrights. The playing field has been changed permanently by a variety of forces, not least of them being the internet. I thought we had covered this. Also, I'd like to point out that there's a difference between "money" as in tips from playing in a pub, and "money" as in $5 per copy. Different amounts = different incentives = different quality/quantity of works.
The balance is not between the ability to produce and the incentive to produce. The balance is between the restriction of freedom on society, and the incentive to produce.
Fair enough. I want to add, though, that the artists are solely resp
Your assessment of money and copyrights is exactly correct. I was fan only because of your delightful sig, but now I can see your views are also intelligent and well-reasoned. The only thing I'd like to add is that even though copyright has been severely unbalanced, most of the core concepts are still there, and the system still works to a reasonable degree, even if it's not optimally efficient. Copyright reform should be focused on balancing copyright, rather than overturning it IMHO.
The technological difference between then and now is all the more reason that copyrights should be abolished. Back then, copyrights barely restricted people, and now their restrictions are extremely intrusive.
The technological difference between then and now is precisely why copyright was invented, and should be upheld. In a rare moment of foresight, lawmakers actually came up with a forward solution to a future problem. Now that it's actually trying to do its job with a large degree of success (we have a thriving culture based on copyright), people who want both the culture it brings and have it for free as well are crying foul, complaining that it's doing its job. It's not perfect by any degree, but it's not nearly as flawed as you and others make it out to be.
Back then, creating music and derivative works was hard and required a lot of incentives, and now the barriers of entry are lower, and thus less incentive is needed.
Well, at least you understand that the past is hardly analogous to the present, let alone the future. However, I'd like to point out that in a rich, efficient, and highly capitalist society, you need to have significant money, time, and dedication to produce and widely distribute something that will not make any money. Money is the great motivator, and nothing good comes from starving any industry of it.
Copyright is a balance between the need of incentive and the invasiveness of the restrictions - and both parameters of this balance were changed against copyright because of technology.
Copyright was supposed to balance incentive for artists to produce, and the ability for artists to produce. We didn't want claims to our artistic territory staked for all eternity, lest we "run out" of free expression, but at the same time, we realised that in order for people to want to create their work, and feel motivated to share with anyone who'll look/listen, then they needed some form of ownership over that work. The barrier of entry has lowered thankfully, but certainly not enough to justify tearing down copyright. People still need to be paid, lest we fall back on the anaemic drip of local artists doing it for the free beers down at the local pub. The "invasiveness" was never really an issue. It was and is a law, and a law that needs to be enforced within reason. That's as far as the "invasiveness" debate goes.
People "don't need to go to live concerts", but they do anyway. People also don't need to go to the theater, and they do. Its a social experience and one that people will continue experiencing, and its unlikely even future technology will change that.
Yeah, growing up in a society where demand for a product almost instantly implies the existence of a supplier, I guess you may not realise this, but if you fuck around with the money supply, there may not be such services for you to enjoy. In the past, we've had ways to make such things worthwhile to the service providers, which allowed them to provide the service, but you simply can't guarantee that with music/movies if you take away the money source.
Also remember that having stronger copyrights does not even necessarily mean creating more content, as copyrights disallow a major form of creativity: Derivative works.
It depends. I would argue that abolishing fair use would create a weaker copyright (rather than a stronger one), because of that exact reason.
Most creative work is derivative work, and we would have far more creative work without restrictions on these derivatives.
Again, you're mashing supply and demand. Just because people want free music really, really bad, doesn't mean they'll get it.
So I already fit your criteria of "living without illegal music for a year".
Impressive. Not everyone fits those criteria. In fact, very few meet it, which is contrary to your next point.
Music survived before copyright restrictions, it will thrive without it in the future as well.
Fixed that for you. People listened to local performers only. Music has moved far beyond that. In fact, thanks to new technology (Remember technology? The difference between then and now?), it's actually too late to go back to the bad-old-days, because thanks to broadband internet and quality sound/home cinema systems, we don't even need to go to live concerts.
No, download an mp3 (or a thousand) until you are caught and let off with a warning. Then download another hundred or so mp3s until you are caught again, if you are a little thick. Then, after two warnings, and a few more mp3s, you get caught again, then you're an idiot, and obviously can't be trusted on the internet. I can't say I'm crying over people triple-offending being denied internet access.
No, but in the vast majority of cases, people don't just stick their illegal files on their hard-drives for decoration (there are far more legal ways to decorate your file-system!) They do the equivalent of spending it, which is to listen to it and to gain pleasure from it.
It's not just you (as you probably know); there are several people with the same criteria for paying for content. Who knows, there could develop a significant, thriving market for free music. You trade off price potentially with selection and quality. Perhaps there really is a significant number of people who's demand for music could be satisfied entirely by free music, but we can't really tell while those people help fill that demand with illegal music. Even you, I don't know you, your means, your taste in music, etc, but I suggest you try living without illegal music for a year and subsist entirely on free music. You may find it harder than you expected, especially since people can underestimate the influence that non-free music has on their tastes. You will see if your principle is feasible in practice.
If you can live for a long time only on free music, and not buy/download a single piece of non-free music, then I grant you that it makes no difference whether or not you pirate it. However, it's a catch-22 in my favour, because if it truly doesn't make a difference to you, you don't need to break the law, and you wouldn't need to pirate anyway. But if you did for some insane reason, and you didn't advertise the fact, and you disabled uploads on any P2P network you use, then yes, your piracy wouldn't make a difference. The problem is the bar for that is set very high, not many people make it.
Same thing could be said about money. You can copy it, and you don't deprive anyone of its use, yet it means that the entire currency is devalued, and the currency that everyone else has ends up worth less than it did before the crime. The victims in this case are the people as a whole. In the case of copyright infringement, the damages are concentrated purely to copyright holders. You may not see it (or counterfeiting) as stealing, but there's no question of deprivation, victimhood, or morality; copyright infringement and counterfeiting are morally wrong, when measured against the morality of society as a whole. And no, before you jump to conclusions, I'm not part of the copyright lobby, just someone with the ability to reason.
All this, of course, is completely beside the point, as I wasn't comparing copyright infringement with stealing in the first place.
OK, I have two replies already pointing out that my analogy is flawed, which it certainly would have been had it been intended for that. It was a reply to the comment by the GP, who said professional shoplifters are allowed to buy groceries from stores. I wanted to remind him that store owners would apply the same policy to known thieves, just with less strikes.
Yeah, but as soon as any intelligent. competent, and caring people express a genuine interest in promoting copyright, people who are anything but will see them as shills, shysters, and despots.
These new punishments wouldn't be applied retroactively, of course. Then next to no-one who actually uses the internet would be instantly banned.:)
You do raise a good point though. Banning from the internet would be a major inconvenience at worst for certain people. For companies, at worst, it would be nothing short of a death sentence. I think it would stop corporate copyright infringement pretty damn quickly if it were brought in.
Denying internet access isn't like a sentence of probation anymore; it's more akin to house arrest and should only be applied when the punishment fits the crime.
And how doesn't it fit the crime? It's considerably damaging to artistic industries as they are now, plus to the potential of art to remain economically feasible, which fits the severity of the crime. It doesn't require prison sentences, which fits the physically non-dangerous nature of the crime. It gives you three warnings, which fits the ubiquity of the crime amongst the general population. I'm failing to see why it doesn't fit.
Think of house-arrest for a moment (I just came from the monitoring schoolchildren thread). It allows you to remain at home in exchange for certain civil rights, like your right to leave your house of your own free will. Why can't this principle be applied to illegal file sharing?
You also need to factor in the "three strikes" policy. One would hope that any copyright infringers would have the message after one strike, or at the most, two. The disconnecting of the internet is just meant to be a powerful deterrent, and would only be applied to three-time repeat offenders. Most infringers would be warned and they'd have the opportunity to stop sharing, without seemingly ludicrous sums in fines/financial-compensation being handed under the table to the RIAA, or whatever their Canadian branch is called.
All that money goes to the video store and not to the developpers.
That's actually not true. You need permission to rent (it's not classified as personal use if you rent it out to strangers for a fee), and that permission costs a pretty penny. Some of that pretty penny will go straight back to the developers.
You can watch it for x amount of time and then it's over. Since it is a digital product, it doesn't get a shorter lifespan.
I think you just contradicted yourself there. I think the point here is that they can sell it to you in whatever form you can mutually agree on, you just can't copy it.
In that case, what would be the difference in giving one game to one person after another after they finish it and giving digital copies to everyone at the same time?
It's all about supply vs demand. If you buy a game second hand, you deprive the original owner of the game, you receive a used copy which is likely to have a shorter lifespan, and you have only one copy. It's essentially (but not completely) equivalent to the same person owning it the whole time. If you share the game, well, that's however many copies created eaten out of the potential market for that game.
Just so you know, my positions are very well thought through.:)
Tangible obviously does not mean what you think it means.* You can't touch your bank balance, you can't taste your bank balance, you can't keep your bank balance under lock and key. A bank balance is intangible, and I, for all my shit-for-brains, still believe it counts as property.
* Certain definitions fit bank balance, but they also fit IP equally well
Music is prohibitively expensive right now, thanks to declining sales, not completely the fault of piracy.
I'm currently enjoying Rhythmnbox's direct connection with Magnatune and Jamendo. There's a fair bit of rubbish, but there is certainly a fair amount of talent as well.
If you really want to hear music from this mysterious duo, then perhaps search ebay/amazon for second-hand CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
10L gross, 500mL net. Only from Microsoft!
Exactly. Even though it didn't help artists in the short term, it was obviously perceived that information transmission was becoming easier and easier, flows of communication were becoming free-er and free-er, and the future of art as a business was becoming dimmer and dimmer. It was an impressive bit of lawmaking, especially since not only did it try to head off future problems, but it did it in such an elegant, cost-effective way.
Performances of what? I happen to like artistic, carefully constructed electronic pieces of music, but they can't easily or effectively be performed live. They're not a true performing art. What then? Are my tastes going to be limited here on in to variations of two guitarists, a singer, and a drummer? What about books? They're fine now because physical books are a pain to copy, and e-readers are expensive, but that will inevitably change. What then? Is literature going to be limited to private readings?
The problem here is that you are approaching the financing of art in a piecemeal way. This has the major disadvantage of being completely inflexible, which is a death sentence in our modern world of rapidly revolving technology. Every time a new market becomes feasible, or an old market stops being feasible, then you have to redesign the system, or accept that art will never evolve again. If you thought the RIAA was a reactionary old dinosaur, wait until you see the music business after copyright. It will be a dinosaur that became extinct long ago, and for good reason.
If we abolished copyrights, the best you could hope for is all copyrights be terminated retroactively, and effective immediately. Then you'd have a large flood of new works populating the public domain, and people would indeed have more access to culture, at least, in the short term. Artists wouldn't create nearly as many works, but people would be relatively happy, until, slowly, we all get tired of the same old offerings. I know this would happen, because if this weren't the trend, we'd all be enjoying classic artworks for free, and the artistic industries would be out of business. When people reach that stage, they'll have nowhere to turn for their culture. It'll have stagnated and failed to evolve. No other country would be prepared to export their culture to the US, due to the lack of copyright protections. You'd be sent right back to the dark ages in a generation.
History doesn't prove jack shit about copyrights. The playing field has been changed permanently by a variety of forces, not least of them being the internet. I thought we had covered this. Also, I'd like to point out that there's a difference between "money" as in tips from playing in a pub, and "money" as in $5 per copy. Different amounts = different incentives = different quality/quantity of works.
Fair enough. I want to add, though, that the artists are solely resp
Your assessment of money and copyrights is exactly correct. I was fan only because of your delightful sig, but now I can see your views are also intelligent and well-reasoned. The only thing I'd like to add is that even though copyright has been severely unbalanced, most of the core concepts are still there, and the system still works to a reasonable degree, even if it's not optimally efficient. Copyright reform should be focused on balancing copyright, rather than overturning it IMHO.
No, download an mp3 (or a thousand) until you are caught and let off with a warning. Then download another hundred or so mp3s until you are caught again, if you are a little thick. Then, after two warnings, and a few more mp3s, you get caught again, then you're an idiot, and obviously can't be trusted on the internet. I can't say I'm crying over people triple-offending being denied internet access.
No, but in the vast majority of cases, people don't just stick their illegal files on their hard-drives for decoration (there are far more legal ways to decorate your file-system!) They do the equivalent of spending it, which is to listen to it and to gain pleasure from it.
It's not just you (as you probably know); there are several people with the same criteria for paying for content. Who knows, there could develop a significant, thriving market for free music. You trade off price potentially with selection and quality. Perhaps there really is a significant number of people who's demand for music could be satisfied entirely by free music, but we can't really tell while those people help fill that demand with illegal music. Even you, I don't know you, your means, your taste in music, etc, but I suggest you try living without illegal music for a year and subsist entirely on free music. You may find it harder than you expected, especially since people can underestimate the influence that non-free music has on their tastes. You will see if your principle is feasible in practice.
If you can live for a long time only on free music, and not buy/download a single piece of non-free music, then I grant you that it makes no difference whether or not you pirate it. However, it's a catch-22 in my favour, because if it truly doesn't make a difference to you, you don't need to break the law, and you wouldn't need to pirate anyway. But if you did for some insane reason, and you didn't advertise the fact, and you disabled uploads on any P2P network you use, then yes, your piracy wouldn't make a difference. The problem is the bar for that is set very high, not many people make it.
Same thing could be said about money. You can copy it, and you don't deprive anyone of its use, yet it means that the entire currency is devalued, and the currency that everyone else has ends up worth less than it did before the crime. The victims in this case are the people as a whole. In the case of copyright infringement, the damages are concentrated purely to copyright holders. You may not see it (or counterfeiting) as stealing, but there's no question of deprivation, victimhood, or morality; copyright infringement and counterfeiting are morally wrong, when measured against the morality of society as a whole. And no, before you jump to conclusions, I'm not part of the copyright lobby, just someone with the ability to reason.
All this, of course, is completely beside the point, as I wasn't comparing copyright infringement with stealing in the first place.
OK, I have two replies already pointing out that my analogy is flawed, which it certainly would have been had it been intended for that. It was a reply to the comment by the GP, who said professional shoplifters are allowed to buy groceries from stores. I wanted to remind him that store owners would apply the same policy to known thieves, just with less strikes.
Yeah, but as soon as any intelligent. competent, and caring people express a genuine interest in promoting copyright, people who are anything but will see them as shills, shysters, and despots.
These new punishments wouldn't be applied retroactively, of course. Then next to no-one who actually uses the internet would be instantly banned. :)
You do raise a good point though. Banning from the internet would be a major inconvenience at worst for certain people. For companies, at worst, it would be nothing short of a death sentence. I think it would stop corporate copyright infringement pretty damn quickly if it were brought in.
If you were a store owner and you recognised someone who had stolen from you not once, but three times, would you allow him into your store?
Think of house-arrest for a moment (I just came from the monitoring schoolchildren thread). It allows you to remain at home in exchange for certain civil rights, like your right to leave your house of your own free will. Why can't this principle be applied to illegal file sharing?
You also need to factor in the "three strikes" policy. One would hope that any copyright infringers would have the message after one strike, or at the most, two. The disconnecting of the internet is just meant to be a powerful deterrent, and would only be applied to three-time repeat offenders. Most infringers would be warned and they'd have the opportunity to stop sharing, without seemingly ludicrous sums in fines/financial-compensation being handed under the table to the RIAA, or whatever their Canadian branch is called.
Well, I, for one, didn't see that one coming.
The converse, of course, is not true. ;)
Just so you know, my positions are very well thought through.
Tangible obviously does not mean what you think it means.* You can't touch your bank balance, you can't taste your bank balance, you can't keep your bank balance under lock and key. A bank balance is intangible, and I, for all my shit-for-brains, still believe it counts as property.
* Certain definitions fit bank balance, but they also fit IP equally well
Music is prohibitively expensive right now, thanks to declining sales, not completely the fault of piracy.
I'm currently enjoying Rhythmnbox's direct connection with Magnatune and Jamendo. There's a fair bit of rubbish, but there is certainly a fair amount of talent as well.
If you really want to hear music from this mysterious duo, then perhaps search ebay/amazon for second-hand CDs.
Or maybe you have shit for brains (what would I know?).