Whoever thought it was a good idea to take some of the most complex electronic hardware and software systems we've ever invented, which have typically used architecture designed for a closed system where trust isn't normally an issue, and connect it to arbitrary external systems with little if any thought for the security, privacy and reliability implications, really should be banned from ever doing anything with technology again for the good of us all.
Well, at this point I'm pretty sure one of us doesn't really understand how copyright works, but as someone who has run businesses in this field for a long time and probably spent more money on real legal advice about these issues from real lawyers that you've earned in your entire career, I suspect it's not me. In any case, this discussion isn't going anywhere, so HAND and I think we're done here.
The point is that the default position under copyright is that the right holder gets to control who is allowed to perform certain acts with the work, and the main effect of all the related international law is to allow the enforcement of such rights internationally. Permitting other use without the copyright holder's consent requires specific provision. For example, various countries' fair use/dealing provisions permit some use even without the copyright holder's consent and the law specifically allows for this. So, unless there is also some basis in law for regional licensing, how do you think this idea of mandatory EU-wide licences would work?
As a potentially relevant anecdote for comparison, the UK tried not long ago to adjust its law to allow uses like format shifting without requiring permission. Even that was struck down shortly afterwards because they didn't demonstrate sufficiently well that the harm to copyright holders was minimal and they weren't proposing any sort of compensation mechanism.
I described a thought experiment in another comment to illustrate why allowing price discrimination can ultimately result in better outcomes for everyone under some circumstances. Perhaps instead of arguing based on your personal moral standards, which is inevitably subjective, you'd like to explain how your version would help some or all of the participants more in the scenario I described there?
Here you go. The EU already imposes extensive pricing controls. As we've been discussing elsewhere in this Slashdot story, currently there is still tolerance for differences in IP licensing in different places, but it's clear that eliminating such differences is one of the big goals of the digital single market project (though the degree to which they could legally force that issue given broader international agreements is apparently the subject of some debate).
There's a lot more to international IP law in 2019 than just the Berne Convention, and "Yes, it does" is not exactly a powerful argument.
The principle of copyright is that the rightsholder gets to determine who is allowed to perform certain restricted acts with the work. The function of most international copyright law today is to extend those same rights across almost the whole global market, in particular enforcing the rights of copyright holders in one place against people using the work in restricted ways somewhere else.
So, if the premise from Bert64's comment is that granting a licence anywhere in the EU would automatically grant additional permissions across the rest of the EU even if the copyright holder didn't want to, perhaps you'd like to make a stronger argument for why the normal obligations to enforce others' copyright under treaties to which the EU and/or its member states are signatories do not apply?
The part where the EU digital single market isn't actually a free market in the economic sense, and the EU is artificially intervening through regulation to promote greater uniformity in price and availability than would otherwise be present.
The definition of a free market is essentially that the forces of supply and demand determine what happens without government interference. If the EU really were a single digital market in the economic free market sense, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
And which part of: the economic reality is wrong, don't you grasp?
The part where you think the practical implications of economics are subject to legislation.
Economics is primarily a mathematical discipline. Given a certain set of rules, it attempts to model what will happen next. How realistic the results of your models are depends primarily on how realistic your description of the rules is.
Just because one is richer you take more money from him? For what reason? The service is the same, the costs are the same.
Because some people will both value a product more highly than others and be able to pay that higher price, and under some conditions in a free market it is favourable to allow different prices for different customers so that everyone gets a good outcome.
But the EU isn't a single digital market, at least not in the typical sense of a free market as used in economics. You can't legislate that away. It's just how things are, because you have such different economic conditions in different parts of the Union. Distorting that market to try to make it all work the same anyway is the EU's ideology.
The situation today is clearly only intended to be temporary, though. The EU's openly stated goal is uniformity across the whole digital single market, it's just that some forms of portability and pricing constraints are already required while certain liberties are tolerated for the time being.
Sure, at the moment the EU is basically part-way to its ideal conclusion, but it's been fairly clear about the direction of travel and where it intends to end up. The intent is to have a digital single market where the rules are entirely uniform across all member states and the sorts of pragmatic exceptions that are tolerated today have been eliminated.
The trouble with this sort of argument is that IP law is mostly made at a global scale through mechanisms like WIPO treaties. The EU might not have the ability to enforce arbitrary restrictions on IP and licensing like that.
The purchasing power of people within any market will vary, and any pricing will inherently discriminate against those who can't afford it...
Of course, and merchants often segment markets as a result. That's basic economics at work. The difference here is that the EU is artificially distorting what would happen in a free market for ideological reasons, and there are a variety of adverse consequences to doing that.
The difference with digital content is that the pricing is totally arbitrary, and has no relation to the cost of actually providing the content.
That's not entirely true because of issues like taxes and regulatory compliance, but sure, the basic idea is correct.
Now, please consider this thought experiment. You have an idea for a product with a potential global market of exactly two people, who would both like to have one. One is quite wealthy and would be willing to spend €1,000 for that purpose, while the other is no less enthusiastic but can only afford to spend €100. Meanwhile, you would have fixed R&D costs of €1,030, and the marginal cost to manufacture and supply would be a further €10 per item.
There is a way for all three of you to end up winning here: if each customer gets to buy the product they want for a price they consider worthwhile, they get the products, and you get to make around 5% profit margin on the sales. However, that involves price discrimination, offering your less well-off customer a lower price. If you're not allowed to do that and may only choose a single price level that both customers must be offered, there is no level you can choose that will allow both customers to pay a price they consider acceptable while still making a profit for you as the seller.
Scale that up to the size and complexity of European economics and you have the basic problem with current EU policy in a nutshell.
The only reason to charge more in some areas is that you can.
Yes, and the only reason to charge less in some areas is because your buyers won't pay more. Welcome to economics 101. Merchants are in business to make a living, and they need to bring in at least enough revenue to leave a reasonable profit after costs. If artificially distorting the market to force uniform pricing prevents that, the product or service won't be available at all to anyone.
Unfortunately, this argument also seems to have only one conclusion under current EU rules: platforms like Netflix can't offer content anywhere in the EU unless they hold the relevant licences for everywhere in the EU.
This criticism, along with the pricing level problem I mentioned in another comment below, has been made repeatedly for about as long as the EU has been trying to establish a digital single market.
Of course they will. As someone who sells digital products to customers around the world, I have to wonder what else the EU ever thought was going to happen in this situation.
You can call the 28 a single market, but if the purchasing power of people in the relatively wealthy member states is several times that of people in the relatively poor member states and you prohibit market segmentation, the only options you leave your merchants are making all prices the same at some level they choose. Anyone below that level won't be able to buy the product or service anyway, and anyone above that level is getting a discount if they would have bought it at a higher price anyway at the seller's cost.
In the real world, this mostly means that as a merchant, you set a relatively high price because customers from the wealthy nations are usually more profitable, exclude potential customers who are less well off (damaging both you and them, but not damaging you as much as your other options), and then depending on how nasty you are, enforce your copyrights in the poor nations anyway.
This is a textbook example of the EU's idealistic principles coming into contact with economic reality and losing, and of course both their citizens and their businesses probably lose out as a result, but the Single Market must be protected above all else because reasons...
Problems like careless and inattentive driving might cause an accident to happen, but so does excessive speed sometimes, and either way the higher the speed when an accident does happen the more serious the consequences tend to be. In any case, no-one has yet demonstrated that stage 5 autonomous vehicles are viable with our current technology and understanding, so while we wait a few decades for hypothetical future technologies to cure the problem you think doesn't exist that is killing numerous people every year, maybe we could try something a little less ambitious to save some of those lives in the meantime?
No, I don't think I will. Taxes may be a necessarily evil in the absence of any better system to fund public interests, but they should at least be set fairly and transparently.
You're allowed to drive around semi-freely, it's only fair.
And in my country, we already pay highly disproportionate taxes for that privilege, in the sense that motorists contribute a lot more in tax revenues than is typically spent by the government on providing motoring-related services.
That is very different to hiding a sign showing a newly reduced speed limit behind a tree and then setting up a concealed speed camera ten metres further down the road. That isn't taxation, it's entrapment.
Geez, the nanny state is growing further and faster than ever....are people so scared for their lives these days that they are afraid to live a little and have some risk in their lives?
Well, thousands of people die on the roads in my country every year, and many of them die in incidents where excessive speed was a factor, so maybe a healthy amount of caution is warranted here. These measures could be a good thing.
However, they will only be a good thing if they're implemented sensibly. For example, if there are going to be mandatory restrictions on your vehicle's behaviour based on its interpretation of the current speed limit and these measures are to operate in conjunction with or even replace the driver following visible road signs, it should then be a defence to any charges of speeding or other speed-related offences that the system picked up the incorrect speed and the driver was just doing what it said. If the system is reliable enough to be implemented by law and potentially override or influence the driver's actions, it should be reliable enough to offer a defence in law as well.
Indeed. Never has it been known for any government to exploit speed limits, particularly unexpected or inappropriate ones combined with automated enforcement, to make a quick buck at the expense of motorists whose driving may or may not have actually been dangerous or inconsiderate in any way.
This is why I still buy movies and sometimes TV shows that I enjoy on physical discs. If it's something I might enjoy rewatching later, or a long-running show where I want to make sure I can watch the whole thing, it doesn't work out significantly more expensive given how much I typically watch on the likes of Netflix.
The frustrating thing is that because of the emphasis on streaming and rental models these days, it's much harder to buy a lot of things on disc than it used to be, You can find that seasons 1 and 2 are out on disc, but season 3 isn't, and season 4 is but only on US import that doesn't quite work right here in the UK. Then because Amazon won and killed off all the competition, and right now it doesn't have season 2 on sale, you get stuck anyway.
I miss the old days, when there were actual bricks 'n' mortar shops like Silver Screen, where you could go in and buy most moderately popular films and shows from at least the past decade or two and the classics right off the shelf, and they knew how to get hold of just about anything else if you wanted to order it for collection later. What we have with modern technology should have been better, but as usual the money-grabbing media companies have spoiled it by trying to lock everything up and squeeze out a tiny bit more profit.
There are people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who are not full-time creative professionals.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who can make intelligent decisions about when to pay for an upgrade and how to budget over more than the next quarter.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software outside the United States where the current subscription rates are significantly higher.
I can't speak for anyone else, but as someone involved with smaller businesses often working in creative industries one way or another, we chose some time ago to minimise our dependence on any software with a mandatory subscription, for the simple reason that regardless of price, anything that can be arbitrarily broken or turned off by the software developer is a huge liability. If we can't use the latest version, we'll stick with the old one. If we can't get the old one any more, we'll find something else. We have yet to encounter a situation where that was not possible and we couldn't transfer our important assets -- our data and the people who created it -- to use the new system in some reasonable way.
As a convenient side effect, almost all of the replacements we're using now are either the small-scale "upstarts" competing with established products from the lies of Adobe (think Sketch, Affinity, etc.) or from the FOSS world (think Linux, Blender, etc.). We're both saving money and supporting the little (but growing) guys.
Slashdot Mirror
The big one will be cars.
Will be?
Whoever thought it was a good idea to take some of the most complex electronic hardware and software systems we've ever invented, which have typically used architecture designed for a closed system where trust isn't normally an issue, and connect it to arbitrary external systems with little if any thought for the security, privacy and reliability implications, really should be banned from ever doing anything with technology again for the good of us all.
Well, at this point I'm pretty sure one of us doesn't really understand how copyright works, but as someone who has run businesses in this field for a long time and probably spent more money on real legal advice about these issues from real lawyers that you've earned in your entire career, I suspect it's not me. In any case, this discussion isn't going anywhere, so HAND and I think we're done here.
The point is that the default position under copyright is that the right holder gets to control who is allowed to perform certain acts with the work, and the main effect of all the related international law is to allow the enforcement of such rights internationally. Permitting other use without the copyright holder's consent requires specific provision. For example, various countries' fair use/dealing provisions permit some use even without the copyright holder's consent and the law specifically allows for this. So, unless there is also some basis in law for regional licensing, how do you think this idea of mandatory EU-wide licences would work?
As a potentially relevant anecdote for comparison, the UK tried not long ago to adjust its law to allow uses like format shifting without requiring permission. Even that was struck down shortly afterwards because they didn't demonstrate sufficiently well that the harm to copyright holders was minimal and they weren't proposing any sort of compensation mechanism.
I described a thought experiment in another comment to illustrate why allowing price discrimination can ultimately result in better outcomes for everyone under some circumstances. Perhaps instead of arguing based on your personal moral standards, which is inevitably subjective, you'd like to explain how your version would help some or all of the participants more in the scenario I described there?
Here you go. The EU already imposes extensive pricing controls. As we've been discussing elsewhere in this Slashdot story, currently there is still tolerance for differences in IP licensing in different places, but it's clear that eliminating such differences is one of the big goals of the digital single market project (though the degree to which they could legally force that issue given broader international agreements is apparently the subject of some debate).
There's a lot more to international IP law in 2019 than just the Berne Convention, and "Yes, it does" is not exactly a powerful argument.
The principle of copyright is that the rightsholder gets to determine who is allowed to perform certain restricted acts with the work. The function of most international copyright law today is to extend those same rights across almost the whole global market, in particular enforcing the rights of copyright holders in one place against people using the work in restricted ways somewhere else.
So, if the premise from Bert64's comment is that granting a licence anywhere in the EU would automatically grant additional permissions across the rest of the EU even if the copyright holder didn't want to, perhaps you'd like to make a stronger argument for why the normal obligations to enforce others' copyright under treaties to which the EU and/or its member states are signatories do not apply?
The part where the EU digital single market isn't actually a free market in the economic sense, and the EU is artificially intervening through regulation to promote greater uniformity in price and availability than would otherwise be present.
The definition of a free market is essentially that the forces of supply and demand determine what happens without government interference. If the EU really were a single digital market in the economic free market sense, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
And which part of: the economic reality is wrong, don't you grasp?
The part where you think the practical implications of economics are subject to legislation.
Economics is primarily a mathematical discipline. Given a certain set of rules, it attempts to model what will happen next. How realistic the results of your models are depends primarily on how realistic your description of the rules is.
Just because one is richer you take more money from him? For what reason? The service is the same, the costs are the same.
Because some people will both value a product more highly than others and be able to pay that higher price, and under some conditions in a free market it is favourable to allow different prices for different customers so that everyone gets a good outcome.
But the EU isn't a single digital market, at least not in the typical sense of a free market as used in economics. You can't legislate that away. It's just how things are, because you have such different economic conditions in different parts of the Union. Distorting that market to try to make it all work the same anyway is the EU's ideology.
The goal of EU is to get rid of such differences, not to enforce them.
Sure, but they're putting the cart before the horse.
The situation today is clearly only intended to be temporary, though. The EU's openly stated goal is uniformity across the whole digital single market, it's just that some forms of portability and pricing constraints are already required while certain liberties are tolerated for the time being.
Sure, at the moment the EU is basically part-way to its ideal conclusion, but it's been fairly clear about the direction of travel and where it intends to end up. The intent is to have a digital single market where the rules are entirely uniform across all member states and the sorts of pragmatic exceptions that are tolerated today have been eliminated.
The trouble with this sort of argument is that IP law is mostly made at a global scale through mechanisms like WIPO treaties. The EU might not have the ability to enforce arbitrary restrictions on IP and licensing like that.
The purchasing power of people within any market will vary, and any pricing will inherently discriminate against those who can't afford it...
Of course, and merchants often segment markets as a result. That's basic economics at work. The difference here is that the EU is artificially distorting what would happen in a free market for ideological reasons, and there are a variety of adverse consequences to doing that.
The difference with digital content is that the pricing is totally arbitrary, and has no relation to the cost of actually providing the content.
That's not entirely true because of issues like taxes and regulatory compliance, but sure, the basic idea is correct.
Now, please consider this thought experiment. You have an idea for a product with a potential global market of exactly two people, who would both like to have one. One is quite wealthy and would be willing to spend €1,000 for that purpose, while the other is no less enthusiastic but can only afford to spend €100. Meanwhile, you would have fixed R&D costs of €1,030, and the marginal cost to manufacture and supply would be a further €10 per item.
There is a way for all three of you to end up winning here: if each customer gets to buy the product they want for a price they consider worthwhile, they get the products, and you get to make around 5% profit margin on the sales. However, that involves price discrimination, offering your less well-off customer a lower price. If you're not allowed to do that and may only choose a single price level that both customers must be offered, there is no level you can choose that will allow both customers to pay a price they consider acceptable while still making a profit for you as the seller.
Scale that up to the size and complexity of European economics and you have the basic problem with current EU policy in a nutshell.
The only reason to charge more in some areas is that you can.
Yes, and the only reason to charge less in some areas is because your buyers won't pay more. Welcome to economics 101. Merchants are in business to make a living, and they need to bring in at least enough revenue to leave a reasonable profit after costs. If artificially distorting the market to force uniform pricing prevents that, the product or service won't be available at all to anyone.
Unfortunately, this argument also seems to have only one conclusion under current EU rules: platforms like Netflix can't offer content anywhere in the EU unless they hold the relevant licences for everywhere in the EU.
This criticism, along with the pricing level problem I mentioned in another comment below, has been made repeatedly for about as long as the EU has been trying to establish a digital single market.
Of course they will. As someone who sells digital products to customers around the world, I have to wonder what else the EU ever thought was going to happen in this situation.
You can call the 28 a single market, but if the purchasing power of people in the relatively wealthy member states is several times that of people in the relatively poor member states and you prohibit market segmentation, the only options you leave your merchants are making all prices the same at some level they choose. Anyone below that level won't be able to buy the product or service anyway, and anyone above that level is getting a discount if they would have bought it at a higher price anyway at the seller's cost.
In the real world, this mostly means that as a merchant, you set a relatively high price because customers from the wealthy nations are usually more profitable, exclude potential customers who are less well off (damaging both you and them, but not damaging you as much as your other options), and then depending on how nasty you are, enforce your copyrights in the poor nations anyway.
This is a textbook example of the EU's idealistic principles coming into contact with economic reality and losing, and of course both their citizens and their businesses probably lose out as a result, but the Single Market must be protected above all else because reasons...
Problems like careless and inattentive driving might cause an accident to happen, but so does excessive speed sometimes, and either way the higher the speed when an accident does happen the more serious the consequences tend to be. In any case, no-one has yet demonstrated that stage 5 autonomous vehicles are viable with our current technology and understanding, so while we wait a few decades for hypothetical future technologies to cure the problem you think doesn't exist that is killing numerous people every year, maybe we could try something a little less ambitious to save some of those lives in the meantime?
Consider it a tax.
No, I don't think I will. Taxes may be a necessarily evil in the absence of any better system to fund public interests, but they should at least be set fairly and transparently.
You're allowed to drive around semi-freely, it's only fair.
And in my country, we already pay highly disproportionate taxes for that privilege, in the sense that motorists contribute a lot more in tax revenues than is typically spent by the government on providing motoring-related services.
That is very different to hiding a sign showing a newly reduced speed limit behind a tree and then setting up a concealed speed camera ten metres further down the road. That isn't taxation, it's entrapment.
Geez, the nanny state is growing further and faster than ever....are people so scared for their lives these days that they are afraid to live a little and have some risk in their lives?
Well, thousands of people die on the roads in my country every year, and many of them die in incidents where excessive speed was a factor, so maybe a healthy amount of caution is warranted here. These measures could be a good thing.
However, they will only be a good thing if they're implemented sensibly. For example, if there are going to be mandatory restrictions on your vehicle's behaviour based on its interpretation of the current speed limit and these measures are to operate in conjunction with or even replace the driver following visible road signs, it should then be a defence to any charges of speeding or other speed-related offences that the system picked up the incorrect speed and the driver was just doing what it said. If the system is reliable enough to be implemented by law and potentially override or influence the driver's actions, it should be reliable enough to offer a defence in law as well.
Indeed. Never has it been known for any government to exploit speed limits, particularly unexpected or inappropriate ones combined with automated enforcement, to make a quick buck at the expense of motorists whose driving may or may not have actually been dangerous or inconsiderate in any way.
This is why I still buy movies and sometimes TV shows that I enjoy on physical discs. If it's something I might enjoy rewatching later, or a long-running show where I want to make sure I can watch the whole thing, it doesn't work out significantly more expensive given how much I typically watch on the likes of Netflix.
The frustrating thing is that because of the emphasis on streaming and rental models these days, it's much harder to buy a lot of things on disc than it used to be, You can find that seasons 1 and 2 are out on disc, but season 3 isn't, and season 4 is but only on US import that doesn't quite work right here in the UK. Then because Amazon won and killed off all the competition, and right now it doesn't have season 2 on sale, you get stuck anyway.
I miss the old days, when there were actual bricks 'n' mortar shops like Silver Screen, where you could go in and buy most moderately popular films and shows from at least the past decade or two and the classics right off the shelf, and they knew how to get hold of just about anything else if you wanted to order it for collection later. What we have with modern technology should have been better, but as usual the money-grabbing media companies have spoiled it by trying to lock everything up and squeeze out a tiny bit more profit.
There are people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who are not full-time creative professionals.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who can make intelligent decisions about when to pay for an upgrade and how to budget over more than the next quarter.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software outside the United States where the current subscription rates are significantly higher.
I can't speak for anyone else, but as someone involved with smaller businesses often working in creative industries one way or another, we chose some time ago to minimise our dependence on any software with a mandatory subscription, for the simple reason that regardless of price, anything that can be arbitrarily broken or turned off by the software developer is a huge liability. If we can't use the latest version, we'll stick with the old one. If we can't get the old one any more, we'll find something else. We have yet to encounter a situation where that was not possible and we couldn't transfer our important assets -- our data and the people who created it -- to use the new system in some reasonable way.
As a convenient side effect, almost all of the replacements we're using now are either the small-scale "upstarts" competing with established products from the lies of Adobe (think Sketch, Affinity, etc.) or from the FOSS world (think Linux, Blender, etc.). We're both saving money and supporting the little (but growing) guys.
On the other hand, most of the world is not the US (and often has better Internet access).