Ryan never supported SOPA. He came out against it. And this event came after Reddit guys said they should pressure him. And then clueless Reddit guys take credit for successfully pressuring him.
I would hope this HN crowd knows about correlation and causation.
This won't be a popular statement, but I think programmers and engineers in general pat themselves on the back more than they deserve in terms of how logical they are in real life situations.
My point is that many engineers I meet seem to have this attitude that since they're an engineer, it's evidence that they're logical and rational in all aspects of life. A recent case in point is an old friend who told me that he liked the chances of his startup because they were all engineers and so made rational decisions about their business. I threw back at him that there are also tons of engineers I've met who fall in love with their technology and make blind stupid decisions because of it.
More cases in point. Many an engineer crashes and burns if ever promoted to management because he doesn't know how to communicate with people. Any quality manager would be able to resolve conflicts easily, and the required people skills can be justified quite logically. This isn't to say that all engineers are idiotic non-people people. This is saying that there's a selection bias that just because someone was good at something, they must be good at other things.
I see many more cases in situations of crisis, deadlines looming, etc. Bet if you up it to a situation of war, no engineer's brain would be able to survive and continue to think logically; only those who are properly trained for thinking will getting continuously mortared would be able to continue functioning. Still more examples out there in areas like marriage relationships, anything that involves dogma (whether political, religious, or scientific), etc.
My point is not that other people are smarter or more logical about the rest of life than engineers. My point is that engineers are not automatically smarter or more logical about the rest of life than other people.
Joe sixpack, presumably. It might feel more logical to think things out verbally and explicitly, but in non-engineering problems Joe's "burkean conservative" approach of not messing with things he doesn't understand and blindly relying on his built-in social heuristics leads to better outcomes.
>And then clueless Reddit guys take credit for successfully pressuring him.
Phew. I was afraid a thread might go by without an opportunity to make sure I feel better that I'm an HNer and not a redditor.
Paul Ryan's stance on SOPA was unknown until a candidate came along opposing him. Reddit rallied behind him because Zerban was anti-SOPA. I don't think it's crazy to assume that might have some impact on Ryan's newly announced stance.
This is why bills are almost never voted down. One thing that politicians hate doing is switching positions because they can then get attacked on both sides of an issue and as a flip-flopper. In fact, bills rarely get voted down once they are proposed. Congressional leaders rarely force a vote unless they know the bill will pass. The most common way for a bill to die is to just never vote on it. This allows them to not support or oppose something controversial.
This is true. If someone is completely supporting the bill then it's unlikely you could trivially turn them against it unless they both care & haven't understood it. Turning someone who has doubts is far easier because they were waiting for help deciding anyway.
Online piracy is not a legitimate problem. It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap duplication and transport of digital goods. Industries have to innovate to adapt to new technologies and circumstances.
It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap duplication ...
I've been trying to accumulate a list of practices or behaviors where there has never been any (or much) barrier to copying, and where for someone to complain would sound a little bizarre.
For example, hair styles. If you dream up a wicked hair style and go out in public, anyone who sees you can likely copy it for themselves.
Fashion in general. There's little IP protection beyond trademarks (hence why popular brands use their trademarks in their designs, e.g. Louis Vuitton) and everyone shamelessly copies everyone else. It's a fascinating case study: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2006/11/8283.ars
Hollywood invests as much as $100M in a single movie, probably no hair style has involved such effort. Perhaps if someone did invest $100M developing one hairstyle, they would try hard to protect it.
Voting down this point of view is pretty sad. While the content guys have certainly behaved badly, and sure don't seem to be creative in searching for solutions, you can't deny that there is a huge problem for them if we went to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone. Huge investments in films like that would completely cease to exist. No amount of hand waving will paper over that fact, and he's just stating it, not advocating SOPA or anything like that.
*...if we went to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone."
My interest in this is wondering about areas where people innovate but rarely expect any sort of copy protection.
Few people are going to invest the budget of a Hollywood movie into a hair style. Is this because they know there is no practical way to stop people from copying hair styles?
Suppose the was never any way to copy protect [films|recordings|whatever]. How would this change things? Is (or was) the difficulty of copying things an aberration, a quirk of a relatively brief period of technology? Should we tell the MPAA and RIAA, hey, you guys just happen to have lucked out for a few decades?
If someone invested several million dollars in a hair style, and then tried to get laws to prevent people from copying it because copying breaks their business model they'd be mocked for basing a business model on an untenable condition. At what point do we do the same for people creating digital goods?
If you've ever seen a movie or listened to music, it stands to reason that you've benefited in some way from those industries, no? Come on people, engage your brains, this isn't reddit. IP is a complex, multi-faceted issue without any easy answers.
Most of the reasoning about piracy is based on the idea of content consumption. Content is not consumed in the sense that consuming it doesn't make it vanish. If I listen to a recording, you can listen to it, either at the same time, or later, when convenient.
The economics of content production and distribution changed. It's no longer difficult to move, replicate or make content from it. When refrigerators threatened ice factories we didn't outlaw them. How much does long-distance telephony cost to airlines? How much more business would they have if, in order to talk to your factory manager in Shenzhen, you had to be there? How much business have hotels lost thanks to it?
Luckily for us, they didn't have the power to outlaw long distance telephony.
This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are afraid they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent it.
You're conflating things that are useful with things that have some kind of inherent enjoyment value for people.
For instance, if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing for it, I guess we could just shrug our shoulders, but I think the world would be worse off for it.
> This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are afraid they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent it.
I'm not in favor of what they are proposing by any means, but do think there's a balance to be struck somewhere. What Amazon is doing with the Kindle isn't bad: it's very quick and easy to get eBooks across a whole range of devices. It's not perfect, but things like that and iTunes seem to be a good direction.
> if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing for it
Cory Doctorow manages that very well. There are models that make writing books and creating other works of art economically viable. Also, most writers never get well paid for the books they write. Actually, most artists are really poor.
Anecdotes are not data. Perhaps Cory Doctorow is leaving a lot of money on the table. That may work in his case, but for someone 'at the margin', it may mean they are forced to do something else, rather than write.
Huge investments in films like that would completely cease to exist. No amount of hand waving will paper over that fact...
Since we've never experimented with a total abolition of copyright, the idea that investment in film would cease cannot be called a "fact." I think the overall idea is that, if we reduced the scope of or eliminated copyright, other incentive systems would emerge to allow passionate creators to continue to practice their art. There's probably another sentiment that Hollywood could do everything it does now with smaller budgets if they were subject to more natural market forces. I don't think most people arguing for drastic copyright reform are arguing for a complete destruction of the arts (though many on that side of the debate probably wouldn't miss most of what Hollywood puts out).
Personally, I think it's reasonable to expect that movies that were made in my childhood can be reinterpreted freely well before my death, just as Shakespeare and Dickens can be reinterpreted now. Allowing slightly aged works to fall out of copyright shouldn't disincentivize future creation.
If you read carefully, I said "huge investments", not that investment at all would cease to exist.
What are some of the "other incentive systems" that would allow you to sink 100 million dollars into a film and hope to recover them?
The only one to spring to mind would be in-film product placement and advertising, although to tell the truth I think there's already enough of that.
> Personally, I think it's reasonable to expect that movies that were made in my childhood can be reinterpreted freely well before my death, just as Shakespeare and Dickens can be reinterpreted now. Allowing slightly aged works to fall out of copyright shouldn't disincentivize future creation.
I agree with that 100%. Copyright is too far tilted in favor of producers right now. My point is merely that it is a balance.
> What are some of the "other incentive systems" that would allow you to sink 100 million dollars into a film and hope to recover them?
Maybe we are approaching the end of the $100M movie era. Maybe they will no longer be able to spend $100M in special effects and famous faces and be required (gulp) to deliver compelling stories.
> Hollywood invests as much as $100M in a single movie
I seriously doubt any single copy deprives movie producers of $100M. Most probably, they haven't even lost a sale - if someone finds $10 too expensive and opts for a free copy, they wouldn't buy the DVD either.
In a copyright free world, movie theaters would of course be free to copy the movies too. Benefits would accrue to landowners, basically, rather than producers of movies.
Change it how? All I ever hear are handwavy proposals about "other ways" of doing things. How could you get a significant return on an investment in producing a film? Even non-flashy films cost a lot of money to make.
Or would films become the exclusive province of wealthy sponsors with money to squander?
I've been trying to accumulate a list of practices or behaviors where there has never been any (or much) barrier to copying, and where for someone to complain would sound a little bizarre.
Never mind hair styles and couture.... your question carries weight beyond that, I think. Here's my suggested answer: Philosophers and theologians have debated for thousands of years about whether life has meaning and purpose. Arguably, modern genetics and evolutionary biology have given us a definitive answer to that question: if life can be said to have any purpose at all, that purpose is making copies.
Making copies on behalf of our genome is what we're here for. This is one of the few statements you can make about all forms of life, from viruses to blue whales. So when someone introduces an artificial means of making information uncopyable, they're going up against the oldest, strongest instinct that any creature possesses: the instinct that tells us to back up our information by spreading it far and wide.
And yes, that includes other peoples' information, considering how much of our genome has been cribbed from other species.
It's an imperfect argument and probably a bit too abstract for Congressmen to either grasp or successfully shoot down, but I like it.
Right. Pollution was an unavoidable side effect of the Industrial Revolution, and spoilage is an unavoidable side effect of long-distance transport of perishable goods, and heat is an unavoidable side effect of pretty much everything, but all are still legitimate problems.
The very fabric of nature is changing for humans. Data can be replicated worldwide in seconds. The problem of intellectual property getting copied is not solved by hindering or putting barriers to copying. The solution is to change the business model.
Make it so that the copying is free and anyone can do it, but If I earn money from said copying, then a reasonable tiny fraction of my profits go to the entity that did most of the work in making my profits possible. All surrounded by a heaping helping of due process. Note that my proposal isn't necessarily the best one, but it doesn't attempt to enforce the impossible.
I completely agree, but I am also follow the school that you shouldn't spend energy on something you can't control or stop. Instead you should focus on things that you can readily change to mitigate the problem, or even make it go away.
It's hard to know how controllable something is until you try to control it. The copyright industry has plenty of evidence that it isn't practical. They're slowly moving toward accepting that not everyone wants a DVD, but I still can't get half the movies I want to see with Netflix Instant. I would happily pay a few dollars more for Netflix if the copyright industry would let them stream new DVD releases.
I would actually love to see a better tiered Netflix model. $5/mo for TV shows that have been released on DVD, $5/mo for movies that have been released on DVD, an extra $10/mo for new release DVDs, an extra $10/mo for TV shows delayed a week from broadcast, an extra $10/mo for getting those released DVDs mailed to you (broad spectrum). So for the full gamut, you're paying a lot (but less than cable), but you can pick and choose which of those matter to you.
If you wanted just what they have right now, you'd pay $10/mo for released movies and DVD releases of TV shows streamed. If you wanted just TV shows including recently aired, you'd pay $15/mo. To get those released DVDs mailed would cost $25/mo, and to get it all you'd be paying $40/mo.
If you think about a music subscription service, you'd basically paying the cost of 1 album per month for songs you're going to be listening to over and over. With this structure of Netflix, you'd be paying for two DVDs per month but movies are generally only watched once or twice.
I'd be happy to pay $50/mo for netflix that included HBO, Showtime, AMC and BBC new releases if only because Netflix supports so many devices.
Cable services provide unbelievable horrible services (locally it's $25/mo to rent a PVR that supports DNLA but it is software disabled so you have to rent a PVR for each TV!)
Not trying to relitigate copyright? Focusing instead on the terrible bill that people both ideologically in favor of and against copyright would oppose if they were fully educated about it? Is that a troll question?
Some people genuinely believe copyright is deeply flawed, and that society should reduce the incredible weight it is currently given. Those arguments won't win new opponents to SOPA, but they do need to be addressed.
Painters were copying paintings long before digital film made the practice easy. Musicians were covering other musicians long before the advent of mechanical sound recording. Copying is an inherent facet of the arts. It's our natural way of appreciating other people's work. It has nothing to do with technological ease.
Forgery has neer been seen as a legitimate undertaking in the world of painting. While pieces of art have always been heavily derivative, it has never been common for artists to forge. The first reason for this being the ethical implications behind it, and the second being the massive amount of effort required to accurately copy a masterpiece. Even those forgeries that have fooled experts for some time pale in comparison to the real thing.
Furthermore, whats being discussed now is not analogous to the topic of forgery. A more apt comparison would be likening the piracy of music to viewing photographs of Vermeer's work. Yet even this isn't a perfect fit, as one can argue ( and quite correctly in my opinion ) that viewing a photograph of a Vermeer is in no way is the same as seeing it in person. And almost invariably the owners of these paintings charge money for access to them. While these parties are generally not profiting off of these fees money still needs to be paid for access.
In the case of audio files, the ease at which one can copy and distribute a perfect replica of the original work certainly does contribute to its ubiquity. If one could only download a 96kbit/s CBR mp3 of a song, I'd bet far fewer people would be downloading their music.
What if I replaced "Online piracy" with "Gunshot deaths" and "digital goods" by "guns": Gunshot deaths are not a legitimate problem. It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap guns.
actually, you're looking at the wrong parts of the analogy. he's comparing guns to copying files and online piracy to murder. but i'll take the bait and show why online piracy is like shooting someone.
first: they are both "unavoidable side-effect[s] of having easy and cheap" <something>.
second: they both might be bad. shooting someone could be good (maybe that person is trying to blow up a school). it could be bad (maybe the person being shot is just a random person off the street). online piracy might be good (maybe it encourages freedom or exposes government corruption or something). copying a file might be bad (maybe you sharing this movie with all of your friends makes it impossible for the indie director to make further more movies).
of course, you're also totally missing the point: just because something is unavoidable doesn't mean you shouldn't write laws to mitigate it. murder is unavoidable side-effect of human impulses. we should write a law saying murder is illegal.
i actually don't think we should pass draconian laws to deal with online piracy, but that doesn't make the argument valid. if something is bad, we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods.
> we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods.
Wake me up when such methods exist. Right now they don't and politicians who represent a small group of copyright owners instead of a much larger contingent of content consumers are proposing bad laws to protect those who feed them.
The analogy also breaks because murder or theft deprive someone of something (in the case of murder, something irreplaceable) while content piracy only deprives content owners of a sale they most likely would never make.
You did it with a faulty analogy. The analogy compared a permanent physical harm to an indefinite harm. Two things have to be analogous to fit an analogy.
The argument he was responding to was unsound. The parent comment attempted to refute the claim that piracy is a legitimate problem by pointing out the ease at which it is done. Jayzee's analogy was never meant to compare shooting someone with sharing a song in terms of severity. Rather, it was demonstrating how flawed that line of thinking is.
The line of thinking isn't necessarily flawed. Digital copying is fundamentally different from any act that can be performed in the physical world, and no combination of analogies can ever do justice to that fact.
Some of us who grew up in the digital world, and consider ourselves "citizens" thereof, want to see it allowed to develop independently of the arbitrary restrictions of the physical and political world. Regardless of the fact that servers and networks exist in physical locations, the actual subjective experience of using the Internet is like being in another place entirely, where those physical locations and borders cease to exist entirely.
Guns are physical products and the comparison isn't apples to apples, unless you're talking about distribution on a massive scale.
Building and distributing on a massive scale, means that the whole operation will be illegal. Otherwise the state will make sure that you can only sell to licensed individuals and will also make sure that those guns won't be cheap.
To manufacture guns you need the materials required, like steel, wood, ceramic, ABS plastic and so on and you need to get them cheaply. To produce them cheaply you also need a heavily automatized factory that accommodates lots of processes like forging, stamping, milling, welding, riveting, casting and drilling. You can also outsource work, but to produce cheap guns you're better off controlling the whole stack. Of course, you could steal or buy those guns from the black market, like from the former Soviet Union arsenal, but doing so implies that you have connections and money to bribe people. Supply is also limited. And the risks are higher, since there are always people looking for those missing guns. So you're better off building your own factory, which of course has to be shielded from the local authorities (more bribes).
To distribute guns, you need a distribution network. And because illegal distribution is illegal and leaves traces, such a line of work is very high-risk. Like, you can always hire junkies to do the street-level distribution for a small price, but junkies are often getting caught by the police and then become valuable witnesses. Lots of mobsters got caught because of junkies. Also, if you want to cross the borders of a country with your merchandise, then things get really complicated. So if you want distribution on a massive scale, then it isn't going to be without a high price.
Compare to the Internet: communications can be encrypted with no way to eavesdrop without the key, it has very few single points of failure (e.g. DNS) and eavesdropping on peer to peer communications is a bitch, all this while copying and distributing has an absolute zero cost and can be done on a freakishly big scale.
4 days ago I wrote an article on my personal blog ~ 10,000 people viewed it in a single day, even though I'm a nobody. When you, as an individual, will be able to showcase your guns to 10,000 people in a single day, then it will be an apples to apples comparison (and you could use the Internet for that, but distribution and availability is location-dependent, you can't just click "download gun").
I think his point was that just because a crime is easy to commit, it doesn't mean that it's okay to do it.
Just because pirating things is easy, doesn't mean that it should be okay, in the same way that if getting guns and killing people was easy, it wouldn't mean that doing so is okay.
I was trying to say that guns will never be cheap enough or as easy to distribute. From the point of view highlighted by you, the comparison is even more flawed.
Downloading a file doesn't threaten anybody's life. Killing for the sake of killing is also not about money.
Before refrigerators happened, I'm sure there were companies selling ice to rich folk for a nice price. And if you lived then, I'm sure you could come up with all sorts of reasons for why refrigerators should be outlawed.
What I'm trying to say (and what I think jayzee was trying to convey) is that rbanffy's logic is flawed, and that just because pirating things is easy doesn't make it right. What we call pirating might be okay, but the idea that because something is easy to do it shouldn't be illegal is flawed. Attempting murder is arguably just as easy as downloading a pirated version of a game, but it's not okay. The only difference between the two is that it feels obvious that murder is harmful, but downloading that song instead of paying for it doesn't feel quite as bad.
That being said, I agree that copying things should be legal, but not because doing so is easy. I think that it should be legal to copy things because I don't think people should be allowed to restrict what I do just because they want more money.
I don't believe rbanffy ever said "easy." The actual word used was "unavoidable." The inevitable result of giving people the practically limitless ability to copy information without cost is that people will copy information.
In response to your earlier comment ("...just because a crime is easy to commit..."), the right question to be asking is why something that's inevitable should be considered a crime at all. You might as well outlaw the water cycle.
In that light, the question is not "How do we stop the inevitable," but "What do we do to keep making big money in harmony and cooperation with the inevitable?"
It's probably better not to bring up any of the traditional wedge issues (guns, abortion, etc.) during discussions on SOPA. We're incredibly vulnerable to them due to the diversity of our little coalition and they'll just derail the discussion (and even if they don't half the readers won't understand your point).
I wonder how you differentiate that from old-fashioned high-seas piracy, where it's an unavoidable side effect of cargo ships going slower than pirate ships.
By a similar argument, legislated copy protection is not a legitimate problem, it's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap duplication and transport of content based products.
We pretend that this is a new problem but copyright has been around for a long time and if I were to bet on which side will win in the long term, I'd bet on the same side that won last time: the content producers and copyright holders.
Rep. Ryan's statement is significant and helps the cause in both the House and the Senate. Ryan is a widely respected policy leader for Congressional Republicans. It is also a strong stance for him to publicly oppose another Republican's legislation, while the bill is still being considered in committee.
I think sad how much of a popularity contest politics are. He doesn't really respond to the arguments, just uses the boilerplate "freedom" stuff. You can turn that statement right around, and it'd still make sense. I wish politicians would actually have the time and commitment to know what they were legislating. This system is broken.
Turned around:
> The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history. It should stay that way. In order to do that, we must close those evil sites so that we can have better conditions for the corporations and they will continue to provide jobs and security to our economy.
Having politicians who understand the issues you care about is no guarantee that they will work for them. Yes, most of us yearn for a utopia where we're ruled by super-intelligent benevolent overlords. But in the real world, I'll settle for politicians that take popular positions because it's what the voters want. Ryan did the right thing here, regardless of what you think about his understanding of the issue (or about his other politics), and should be commended. We won this little battle. It's a good thing.
I think the best comment on this I've heard came from Milton Friedman. Paraphrasing, he said:
"Politicians will do whatever they have to do to get re-elected. Everyone thinks if we just elect the right people, we'll have change. If you want change, don't worry about electing the right people. Just make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things".
Now, save for someone being bribed outright by a lobbyist, I think this is the context we need to work within.
"""But in the real world, I'll settle for politicians that take popular positions because it's what the voters want."""
It doesn't always work out best. It becomes a tyranny of the majority. Especially when what's at stake impacts a small group of people (e.g. religious differences, minorities, etc). I'd rather settle for politicians that can think on their own.
I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. He makes a valid argument against the tyranny of the (uninformed) majority.
A significant number of Americans thought defaulting on our debt was a good idea and ignored every expert and economist shouting this would be catastrophic. Their argument was simply "we don't believe you" without supporting evidence, and without any desire to listen to counter-arguments. There is plenty of legitimate controversy over monetary policy, but basically everyone agreed defaulting on the debt was not a good idea.
I'm not arguing for elitism or benevolent dictatorship, but there are definitely times when "average Joe" has no idea what the fuck he is talking about.
In which case shouldn't the correct solution be to educate Joe about the issue and get him to make informed choices at the voting booth and town hall meeting?
Which, it seems, is exactly what happened here. Democracy is working (if not working well). That's a good thing.
Edit: three responses now are picking on my use of the term "educate" and referring to the willful ignorance of the public. That's missing the point. People certainly can be "educated" about issues they care about, as demonstrated here. It's not an issue of "book learning" or making Joe watch the news. It's an issue of Joe knowing what matters to him already and getting access to information that impacts those interests.
One has to be willing and open to learning to be educated. Often, people discussing politics or economics feel that their understanding is already good and have no desire to learn. This is the main reason that these topics tend to turn into a cesspool of a discussion.
I agree, education is key. And I'm happy about what happened in this particular story. Not disputing that at all =)
But how do you educate someone that plugs their ears and yells "na na na na"? This is what I was getting at - politicians that legislate the ignorance of the masses, even when credible sources are saying its a catastrophic idea.
I don't have an answer to this, by the way. The opposite is legislators that ignore the general public and enforce things "for your own good", which is also a problem.
Joe has no incentive to become educated. His odds of affecting the outcome are essentially nil [1], so it's all the same if he votes based on his tribal affiliations or self image (e.g. "look at me, I'm so very not racist!" or "look at me, I'm so religious").
Except that's clearly wrong, as evidenced by this very story. Joe reads reddit and hears about SOPA. Joe tells his rep he doesn't like SOPA. And his rep flips. QED.
The bug in your logic is that "tribal affiliation" is, in fact, an "issue" Joe cares about. You don't think it's an important issue, and probably don't like his affiliation anyway, but it is and he's going to vote on it. But it isn't the only issue.
Basically: you can't expect to "educate" Joe to think like you do. Education can't cure Christiantity, etc... But you can tell him about stuff he cares about. Real people care about SOPA, they just don't know the details. That is something that can be fixed.
Unlike generic politics posts, this is very narrowly focused, and shows how we, using our tools, can make real and immediate difference in how we are governed.
This isn't just "politics", it's practical self-determination.
Ryan never supported SOPA. He came out against it. And this event came after Reddit guys said they should pressure him. And then clueless Reddit guys take credit for successfully pressuring him.
I would hope this HN crowd knows about correlation and causation.