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Common misconception on pirating
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still though, not hearing any alternative between 'we should pirate everything all the time' and the status quo
Exactly. I'm not against changing the copyright laws to favor actual creators over corporations, and to perhaps loosen the "free use" restrictions, but intellectual property rights shouldn't be treated like a light switch.
I've been trying to plow the middle ground and perhaps have been failing.
Limit the length copyright and be slightly less rabid about going after pirates who don't sell their stuff if only because it doesn't do much to help actually stop piracy.
Has anyone been arguing that your right to make money off your creations extends for all eternity? Because I don't think we have been.
I mean you might like a particular song where everyone else thinks its absolutely terrible, not every song or movie is worth protecting for such a long period.
Right, I'm all about not slapping 12 year old girls with 100,000 dollar fines
but at the same time piracy is a not a sustainable action, especially with mediums like tv. Making a tv show is very, very expensive and if you don't contribute to it through hulu, cable subscription, dvd sales, advertising dollars, etc, then you get to whine and moan when your favorite TV show is brought off the air. There is something deeply problematic about the mindset of 'if I just do it then no harm done.'
I basically agree with what sanstodo is saying. Reduce copyright lifetime to a reasonable duration (like 25 years) and add stipulations to the law allowing the public to use orphaned works.
I also think that copyright infringement should be treated as a civil case, not criminal, and that somebody who distributes copyrighted works for free (along the lines of a Bittorrent) should be held liable only for the common retail value of a single copy of each the works in question.
I also think it should be illegal for software companies to install invasive copyright protection systems without full and obvious notification to the user. Installing a rootkit along with a commercial software package is tantamount to hacking, IMO.
And I think there should be a set of common legal standards (a'la Creative Commons) for software purchase and license ownership so you don't have to read a separate EULA for every single package. (I also think that shrinkwrap EULAs should have zero legal power.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah, I think we pretty much agree.
Id argue, on the case of calling it a criminal action, that someone who buys the cd is allowed to do what they want and if they choose to rip the music and share it then thats their choice. If they stole that music from some source like a pre-release cd then bitch at them, but they've paid their money, they can dow aht they want with it. If that happens to be spreading it around the globe, so be it.
Quotation was in response to the "where are you getting this 'purpose of encouraging creation' question and the followup about how I think it should be handled. I do, however, think that the intrinsic "ownership" rights argument made earlier implies that the right should extend into perpetuity.
I don't have an entire, completely alternate framework ready to paste into this thread for handling IP; fortunately, the system we have right now would be fine with a little bit of tweaking. Shorten durations, reduce penalties for noncommercial and contributory infringement and restrict it to civil cases.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Pretty much, this economy is hurting brick and mortar the worst. People want cheap, convenient goods. Yes when you bought your physical copy of starcraft you're right that most of the money went towards the cost of making the game. What changed between then and now was the economy of scale needed to create and distribute such things. It's now easier than ever to create and mass produce things digitally and many are aware and taking full advantage of this.
The reality of it is that Blizzard was taking a gamble, just like any business, by funding development of starcraft or any other game. They paid to make it leveraging on the idea that enough people would think it's valuable to compensate them well for that game. People set the price they're willing to pay through market forces and yes, one of those is piracy. Now that we have so much more power over creation and distribution of content the perceived value of intangible goods plummets. Piracy is only a factor in that it's a big indicator of an inbalance between the assigned value and perceived value of a good. Yes, there are obviously some who pirate and would've bought the game otherwise but by and large based on the correlation of sales to the rate of piracy over the years in various fields, I'd say that it pretty heavily indicates that those people are in the vast minority.
It's really not piracy that's the issue here, it's that people just aren't buying. Piracy just helps us understand more about why they aren't buying.
There's a spirit of the action to be followed here. You're not a music distributor. You bought the CD so that you could listen to it. I'd think most people and labels would be okay with that the license is good for the entire household. There are channels set up for music distributors to buy music (see: radio stations).
Alternatively, you didn't buy the CD and the right to do whatever you want with it. You bought a single license to a collection of music, and the music company was nice enough to provide you with an easy way of accessing it (the physical disc).
In some cases, it's clearly a "no." A broke college student who downloads a game, plays it for an afternoon, and then deletes it clearly would not have legitimately purchased the game if piracy were not available. As long as he's not exposing his dorm network to viruses or utilizing obscene amounts of bandwidth, I think it would be immoral for the college to discipline him for that behavior. However, fast forward that kid 10 years later, and he's got a modded 360 with a 50" plasma TV and a 1TB HD and a Gamefly account that he pirates off of? Fuck him right in the ass - he clearly could be paying for the software he's copying.
The area that I struggle with (again, in moral, not legal terms) is overseas piracy. If somebody in, say, China is selling pirated software at US$5 a copy to people... on the one hand, the fact that people are paying money for the software is evidence of a lost sale. On the other hand, differences in the economy and exchange rate might make legitimate purchase at MSRP infeasible - if your wage is the equivalent of US$50 per week, are you going to spend US$60 on an XBox game? Hell no.
So, yeah, legally, piracy should be illegal. However, I also think there are plenty of cases where it should be overlooked. The harm, in many situations (though clearly not all) is negligible.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Then on the front of the CD should be a big label that says "This is just a license". They can argue that but at the end of the day you're paying a substantial amount of money for a £.26p disc and the contents therein and you, by all rights, should be allowed to do what you want with that disc.
The worst offender is games, nothing annoys me more than when I pay £30, so like 6 hours worth of work for a pc game, and I'm only allowed to install it so many times or on so many machines and have to authorise it through the Internet.
Piracy also drives the perceived value down. That's the step I think you're missing and would change your conclusion significantly.
This is why I do most of my PC gaming through Steam. They've found a system that (as far as I know) works against piracy and is convenient to me at the same time.
It doesn't work. Does stop stuff getting released early however.
That's actually a large part of the battle. Day Zero cracks are awful. Even gaining a week without pirated copies available makes a big difference in sales, which suggests that some pirates are lost sales (though again, hard to quantify).
More importantly think about why it does. People pirate a good because they aren't willing to pay the asked price for it but still want it, and that desire is proportional to the ease of duplicating a good. For instance many people buy knockoff brands or bootleg items because they don't want to pay for a brand name product but want the good. They pay less but receive a slightly lesser quality good in comparison. Some are willing to make this trade off, some aren't.
In the case of digital media we've essentially reduced the cost of duplication to zero for perfect quality. So the only thing that becomes an issue is the matter of pricing. So it isn't really so much piracy itself that drives the perceived value down so much as the fact that people see how effortless it is to make perfect copies of an idea. Yes part of creating that experience was expensive but to the public they only see a final product. So when they see the final product is infinitely and easily duplicatable for no cost (or close enough to it) then that's obviously going to drive the value down. Yes piracy begets more piracy which makes it easier behavior to enable but again that's just a logical consequence of technology reducing the barriers of entry.
It's like the vaults in Fallout, you can lord over the population as much as you want as an overseer, but eventually they can and will figure out that it's safe to go outside and then you're pretty much done for. The only questions are how and when it happens.
That's why the solution involves changing the law and societal norms. The law obviously needs to be updated (for/in reasons and ways stated above at length) and society needs to value the labor needed to produce intellectual property. Once you get past the mechanism of duplication and tie the value of a product to the labor necessary to create it plus the fixed material costs of production, then you've changed the perceived value to be more in line with reality.
For example, my girlfriend is a printmaker. She does copper etchings. A gallery tried to get her to lower her prices by arguing that her artist's price exceeded the cost of the raw materials needed to make her work. The flaws in this argument are obvious. She did not lower her prices and guess what? The pieces sold (and now the gallery owners look like idiots). It's the valuation of labor that people need to factor in and then hopefully perceived values will correct.
Etching copper takes more effort than singing words someone else wrote for a very low cost over music someone made 20 years ago.
I mean noone here thinks Britney or Beyonce write their own music or lyrics for the majority of time correct? They get up on stage and dance about, sometimes they even sing it but thats nothing to do with the tracks on the cd. Should Britney be compensated for 75 years for My Prerogative? A song done by (i think) Bobby Brown many years earlier?
Apart from the odd few, I have absolutely no respect for pop stars and feel no sympathy for them not having that gold plated shark tank.
To be fair these types don't own the copyrights to the songs they jump around to and neither do the songwriters or people who put in the actual "creativity". These rights are owned by the corps who commissioned it. Not that I feel any sympathy for the corp either just saying if you have ire you should direct it at the right people.
So Britney and Beynonce are probably paid a salary by said corp (possibly a royalty or something)
It doesn't really matter what you think of their music (I don't care for it either). But it takes a lot of time and effort (and money) to create the impeccably produced tracks people gobble up. Even if writing the music isn't difficult (actually, some of their songs are pretty well written, emphasis on some), producing it does take time and talent. They don't hire nobodies to mix and master their tracks; they hire some of the world's best (at a huge cost).
In any case, it's not really a valid argument for piracy, just a statement of personal taste and value.
No. Society does not hold that obligation. In almost all cases*, there is no need for actual IP protection and there are clear benefits from fully abolishing the IP regulations.
However, we won't see even a relaxation in our lifetime. There simply aren't enough people/businesses willing to spit on their current livelihood in society's interest.
Also, the level of discussion in this thread is absolutely terrible compared to the last 4 we've had(digital, pc games, eko's and the general IP, IIRC).
*The result from abolishing IP in certain industries can not actually be determined, they could still be unharmed from such an action.
How would it benefit society to discourage people from creating intellectual property?
People do not create intellectual property. They are currently granted an exclusive privilege called by that name.
Regarding "Piracy helps artists:"
It is true that the current distribution system for music is heavily flawed, and that free distribution of music has potential benefits for a band. I believe that, in general, they should aim to freely distribute and to make their money on concerts and such. HOWEVER, I do not believe that the public should be the ones who decide on this business model. If the CEOs want to be dumbfucks let them be dumbfucks and let them crash their company.
Regarding IP Limits and Orphaned Works:
I do not feel that an individual or organization should entirely lose rights to their IP at any point, but that it should gradually dissipate to a minimum stature over time. I support Disney's right to be the only legal source of The Little Mermaid from here to the year 3000, so long as it is always reasonably available. I do not support their right to sue people for painting The Little Mermaid on the wall of a daycare center for that long. However, this should require that the party which owns the material keeps the material in circulation and to continue to pursue it. If a work is left to dwindle out of circulation, it should become purely public property.
Personally, I'd rather have more created than less and be able to choose what I will buy from that larger pool. It is in our best interests to encourage creativity rather than discourage it.
I don't think removing all IP would be a good thing, especially when you consider IP other than copyright, but we could certainly relax it substantially.
Hopefully on the copyright front we'll get another Disney-style exception sometime in the next 10 years, and that will be the catalyst for the supreme court to actually rule against the absurdity of continuous extensions.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
What grand benefit does society get from not having IP protection other than "now I can download XYZ for free hur hur!"
Also I like how you say "in almost all cases" and then "we don't know what would happen."
What are the "clear benefits" from fully abolishing IP protection?
Starving artists do the best work?
Ridiculous, given that many of Disney's flagship creations are "infringements" of established fairy tales. Lifetime of the author is as long as there's even a reasonable case for copyright existing, and even that is far, far too long.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Italic: One of the studies I end up linking often enough, which makes some good points about industries without IP. We've discussed it before and there have been some good points made against some of their examples, but the meat is still sound:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
Yes, we can't be certain that abolishing IP would work, but there is absolutely no way of finding out without at least some momentum towards relaxation.
Bold: I don't think the US Supreme would touch a copyright case in the next 50 years, but yes, that would be a nice start.
Why is that ridiculous?
The established fairy tales have not been maintained by their estates, have they?
If they have, I suggest Disney should start paying up.
As an author, I disagree.
Forgive me if the notion of being a homeless man sitting outside the theater where they're playing a blockbuster hit based on one of my works fills me with rage.
Why should society create a system where creating one work sets you for life? That's the deal: you create something and we'll enforce your "right" to reproduce it, and after such an amount of time, we stop doing that and the public gets it.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Oooh! Oooh! Pick me.
Because the public didn't do anything to deserve getting his work for free - especially if he is still around to reap the benefits of his work. Just becuase his earning potential works in a different way than yours doesn't mean that he should be punished for it.
If people are willing to pay for it why the hell not?
If I create a bank why should I have to open up a chain of burger stands in my 80s?
It's a miracle. You misunderstood what the * is for.
This: is the same as this:
In business or art? In business the benefits are drive for continuous innovation(as you need the first to market advantage to realize your profits), fast improvements by all participants in the industry, a lot and I mean A LOT more dynamic markets, driving down the entry cost in scientific fields, driving down end price for customers and frankly, many more. There are a lot of studies on abolishing IP property from some pretty good universities. Google them.
In art, again, continuous drive for innovation & originality, complete freedom for derivative works, incentive to actually perform, depending on your art form etc.
As far as art is concerned, it's possible to achieve the same or similar goals with a huge relaxation, so flat out abolishment may not be necessary.
Because those who succeed in doing something that has lasting longevity should be rewarded for it.