First off, I'd argue that creating an open space for people to share downloads (that aren't hosted on this open space) is not illegal.
Second, even if by law it is, legality isn't binary. Both murder and stealing a bottle of milk from a shop are illegal, you wouldn't say "either you're for life inprisonment or you're against it, you can't pick and choose" would you? Not only can we pick and chose, our legal systems do pick and chose, and they always have done.
I don't think linking should be illegal, but en mass linking with the blatant intent for people to exploit linked to resources... perhaps it should be? I don't know.
RE: your point that open space for people to link to shouldn't be illegal, is it ok then to create a CP linking website? Would you be OK with this?
Strictly speaking I don't think it would be illegal as long as no content on the site itself contravened the law. If you can differentiate it from a search engine that gives the links in SERPs then I'd back it being made illegal though - if you can't then Google/Bing/etc. are illegal if you can make the SERPs return a link to illegal content. Indeed a link site would be useful for the police as they'd have their job done for them to some extent. A site owner with only links would on the balance of probabilities have visited child pornography sites and so, in the UK at least, have broken the law.
This could lead to some verification being required for registering domains. Maybe then only domains verified by a domain registry as traceable to a person would be allowed to be routed. That could be automated.
I'm not saying that's how things should go but it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to think that things could go that way?
What I'd like to see in general is some balance. There needs to be a quid pro quo to tightening copyright restrictions. Giving us fair use privileges in the UK, like being able to make backups, format shifting and such would be a start. A reasonable copyright term, equable to patent terms would be better. If no such effort is made then it's all just business buying laws to suppress the masses AFAICT.
The Copyrights, Designs & Patents Act 198 has "fair dealing" clauses which specifically permits back ups (Section 50(A)) and time-shifting (Section 70). I'm not aware of any case law that limits these permissions; the Copyright & Related Rights Regulations of 2003 does forbid you from circumventing a technical protection measure, which is in opposition to CDPA.
SS50(A) in CDP as amended refers to backups for computer programs. I'm thinking backups of media, DVDs, CDs. Time-shifting is allowed as you note but it limits you to view a single recording a single time, so you can watch a recording of a TV show but you must never "deal with" the copy once you've viewed it; moreover this only applies in domestic settings.
To consider UK "fair dealing" anything akin to US "fair use" is to not understand the scope of either IMO.
At the moment "format shifting" (but not time shifting) is still illegal, but no-one enforces it and it's going to be changed. (I haven't kept up; maybe it has already changed.)
As you say, being allowed to make backups is tricky if you're not allowed to circumvent technical protection measures.
In the UK you need to prove beyond reasonable doubt to get a criminal conviction. Balance of probabilities is just for civil cases I believe.
I would think though that it could be seen as advertising child pornography if you provided the links that were all to child porn or that the links were labeled as child porn.
Copyright infringement should and must be illegal but it also must be put into perspective. Using copyright infringement to justify censorship, deportation of citizens, multi-million-dollar fines and lifetime prison sentences - that's a symptom of a broken judicial system and governments with bad priorities / corruption.
Downloading films + music for personal use? Should get warnings and eventually a small fine if the issue persists (not £X per file downloaded - a download != a sale).
Commercial copyright infringement? Large scale should result in a few years of jailtime at the most + seized profits. Smaller scale should vary but should be lenient with profits seized.
Every argument against copyright infringement assumes there is some evil destitute world on the other side of having it in place.
We have never in the modern age in any modern first world country ever had an extended time WITHOUT copyright to see what would happen. Everyone just assumes every artist, developer, and investor would disappear overnight and everyone would turn to stone as content is freely distributed.
Or maybe we would just go massive kickstarter style (with some kind of contract guarantees unlike the current system) where the funds people have pay people to make the stuff they want, which is then free for everyone to consume since it is free to reproduce.
It is broken to control content at the distribution level when distribution and replication cost nothing. A really, really import thing to consider - the people who consume currently copyrighted material do not have infinite funds to consume. They spend their disposable income on limited selections of copyrighted materials. If they didn't have to pay for them, but knew their funds were needed to see that future works were created, they would not go buy 15 cars over 3 years and have nothing to watch on tv, they would give money to the shows and artists they like.
There MIGHT be a slight recession if that happened though, because without the "need" to pay for the things people want, they might take the time to pay off massive debts they have or get a savings buffer. But they could already do that, they just don't have the self restraint to. And if feeding off the inability of people to manage their own lives effectively is the only way for MAFIAA affiliates to stay in business, perhaps they should fail.
At that, why don't they fail? Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never. For the last century the big 5 have been established and held their power base with an iron grip. Independent film is nothing compared to them, indie games vs publishers is not even close to as bad as that situation. The major movie studios have no competition to theaters besides outside media forces but never to competitive "startups" because they control the market.
Or maybe we would just go massive kickstarter style (with some kind of contract guarantees unlike the current system) where the funds people have pay people to make the stuff they want, which is then free for everyone to consume since it is free to reproduce.
The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record.For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much.
At that, why don't they fail? Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never. For the last century the big 5 have been established and held their power base with an iron grip. Independent film is nothing compared to them, indie games vs publishers is not even close to as bad as that situation. The major movie studios have no competition to theaters besides outside media forces but never to competitive "startups" because they control the market.
Not so: the biggest jolt to the industry was antitrust regulation in the 1940s, as discussed here - though paradoxically, in a way that's vaguely supportive of censorship: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=178
The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record. For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much.
The restrictive copyright model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record. For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much. Even the few musicians who hit it big with a debut album have actually worked very hard beforehand to persuade a record label to sign them, with very little reward.
Not necessarily true. The label era was dominated by intermediaries (managers, A&R specialists), but those intermediaries were constantly in search of new bands to promote. Many musicians (authors, filmmakers, your_medium_here) don't necessarily have the skills or desire to become experts in publishing and distribution, and the breakdown of existing models also means the breakdown of cross-subsidization for less commercially oriented acts. There are pros and cons to both models; I'm just objecting to the idea that the new publishing landscape is in all ways better than the old.
"don't necessarily have the skills or desire to become experts in publishing and distribution,"
They don't have to be experts, they just have to be good enough. If the decision is 100% of profits goto a label or 30% go to Apple if I just learn how to use iTunes, I think they'll choose iTunes...
Publishing means to make public and that isn't anything special any more, it's been commoditized.
> The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record.For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much.
I call bogus. I've only funded a single Kickstarter project, but it was a completely unknown musician I discovered while browsing Kickstarter. There's no way I'm unique in this.
I doubt anybody expects artists would dissappear overnight. People just think it's fair to reward creators for the entertainment value they provided, and unfair to rip it off without paying a dime. And copyright is the best, simplest way to protect fairness in this regard.
Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support it.
> Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support it.
Are you saying people who defend copyright. Conciously are only being fair to a small subset of the population. But unfair to the majority. And a net loss to humanity. And still they defend copyright?
I don't think so. It seems to me, those who defend copyright have the opinion that copyright is a net benefit to humanity. After all pros and cons are summed. Which I strongly disagree.
The point is that it isn't necessarily favoritism as anybody could create copyrighted works so I wouldn't see it as 'unfair' unless you had to apply to the government for copyright or something like that.
Besides copyright is a net benefit if it helps intellectual property get produced.
I am not arguing that IP would not get produced if it were not for copyright as that is clearly not true. However I'm not sure it is to everyones benefit if creatives had to work 8 hours a day at 7/11 and then only produce on nights/weekends or that they had to hope for some kind of handout (which could well just be companies wanting to advertise or politicians wanting to create propaganda).
A lot of the people (me included) defend copyright because it's a net benefit to the individual, and a fair benefit too (not unfair to anyone).
Whether it's a net benefit to humanity, however you measure that, is neither here nor there. It probably is, but those are not the grounds we're arguing on.
It's sort of like defending privacy. You don't defend it cause of some net benefit to humanity. Who knows, maybe the world would be happier if there were no secrets. You defend privacy because it's fair on an individual level.
I'm concerned about individual rights too. In fact, it's my concern for individual rights that leads me to reject overly restrictive copyright, (among other things). I find these rights to be valuable: freedom of speech, freedom of creativity, and property rights. (To be clear, by property, I do not include imaginary property like copyright.)
Why shouldn't I be able to make back-up copies of the DVDs that are bought with good money? Why should the descendants of Tolkien be able to censor any works of art that includes hobbits? Why should Time Warner be able to censor me from singing happy birthday in public? Why should Google be blocked from bringing out-of-print books to the public? Once a work is published, I don't see why an author should be able to control what's no longer theirs, any more that I would expect a plumber to dictate what I'm allowed to do with the plumbing in my house. Both plumbers and artists labour, and they deserve rewards for their labour, but they do not deserve the right to control my use of what I have purchased from them.
For me, the right of sharing culture is a given, and the right to restrict other people from sharing culture is at best a necessary evil.
Why shouldn't anyone be able to download the game some indie studio bet the farm on and is selling DRM-free for $20, and play it for free?
There's a difference between sharing culture and outright ripping people off; if you think this should be prohibited, you aren't really categorically against copyright, only its current implementation.
You need to take that in perspective. Someone legally purchased the game, and then shared it with someone else. It is the exact same thing people would do with cassette taps 2 decades ago, when the RIAA decried mix tapes would kill music. 2 decades later, that industry is bigger than ever.
The difference is that one cassette is much more expensive than 15 megabytes of magnetic storage, and the gas to go from a friends house to let you copy their tape is much more expensive than the electricity and internet bills to transfer the data.
But it is such a common misconception that it is stealing - it is duplicating bits of data on magnetic storage that, by nature of the physical properties of the device, are extremely easy to replicate.
Yes, it is "hard" to understand the concept that once released, the content is no longer under the control of the creator. But defying the physics of physical storage only causes what we have now - big corporate lobbies are pushing to destroy all personal privacy to make sure no one uses the inherent properties of the technology developed in ways they don't desire.
And that will destroy the internet and society at large if left unchecked. You can't take away personal privacy and expect anything less than collapse. The only solution is to accept the reality that digital content is infinitely reproducible for free, and go from there. The old brick and mortar model just does not work.
I meant nobody cares to prosecute copyright for trivial, personal activities like making backup copies or fan art, so it's quite disingenuous to continually bring them up when the topic of piracy/file-sharing arises.
> We have never in the modern age in any modern first world country ever had an extended time WITHOUT copyright to see what would happen.
That's not an argument against copyright, really. As empiricists, we should be automatically skeptical of any social change that hasn't been tested or observed before, since we can't meaningfully predict its results.
The fact remains that while it may be unenforceable to use copyrights to restrict personal use of content, commercial use is a totally different animal. This includes things like film screenings in a commercial cinema, live musical performances, broadcasting, adaptation to other media, and use in advertising. It's not hard to imagine a future where content creators compete to emphasize these over merely selling copies of their work.
> Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never.
Not true. Television and VCR's were major upheavals comparable to the impact of the internet today.
> Not true. Television and VCR's were major upheavals comparable to the impact of the internet today.
And they fought both as if the world would end and, when they failed, they got wonderful profits from both.
What they can't stand is another player controlling distribution channels. They realize they are not in the content creation business - they distribute content.
The problem with kickstarter style (under those conditions) is that if you wait long enough you will get it all for free anyway. Unless you have large amounts of money to donate it would be very difficult to get the snowball moving.
For example if you saw something with a $100,000,000 target and $0 in donations, if all you could afford was $20 would you bother to put that in?
Also people are often quite bad at knowing exactly what they want.
Let's assume that the iPhone had been a kickstarter project, I'm not sure how much the initial development costs were (for the software part at least) but I'm really not sure whether they would have raised it by just asking people if they wanted a phone with a touchscreen.
I disagree with such punishment system. If a society deems something indesirable, it should be punished very harshly. Or not at all, if it's desirable.
I personally, along with a significant portion of the society (and the majority of youth) view copyright infringement for personal use desirable, but copyright infringement for profit undesirable. I would not punish the first at all, while the second should bear the fine of, say, 20% of yearly profits of the company (punishment for the owners), + jail time for the responsible persons (e.g. the president/CEO, or a lower employee if they are proven responsible).
That seem kind of arbitrary , you want the government out of one thing but you want them into something else.
If there was no copyright or patents then tivoization would be irrelevant anyway as the hardware could be easily copied.
And they should be allowed to infringe on your personal data too because it's digital and therefore easily copied. And now we get to the crux of the argument. Just because everyone will eventually die does not mean you should stop seeing a doctor. Even worse message boards saying you shouldn't even be allowed to go to the doctor!
Probably not, no. In the US, it's more likely to constitute the tort of contributory infringement. Someone should make a "10 Commandments of Nerd Legal Misunderstandings"; #2 or #3 would be "in the law, intent matters hugely".
Either it is or it isn't. If it is, a lot of search engines are in big trouble. Google links to almost every piece of illegal content on the web.
You also have to think carefully about what a link is. Is a magnet link - essentially a hash of the content itself - a link? If so is posting the checksum of a piece of software copyright violation?
Unfortunately the law isn't so black and white, and depends a lot upon intent. Thinking about the technicalities isn't so important; what matters to the court is whether the individuals involved intended to commit a crime.
Upthread people are mentioning images of child sexual abuse.
It's important to mention that in the UK this is an absolute offence. If the image is in your possession then it doesn't matter how or why it's there - intent is irrelevant.
This is important for people responsible for various servers, for example.
Intent still matters. For instance, say someone emails you a image and then contacts the authorities. If merely having such an image in your possesion was an automatic "go to jail, do not pass go", you can be certain there would be a lot of politicians and other unpopular individuals being led away in cuffs.
You either possess the image or you do not. It is a strict liability offence.
There are narrow exemptions - "I did not view the images and I did not know they existed" is one; "The images were unsolicited and I did not keep them" is another.
I'm pretty sure the former is criminal (i.e. illegal), whereas the latter is unlawful, hence why businesses have to chase copyright infringement - rather than the authorities doing it for them. The authorities only step in when it becomes a commercial operation or the activities are linked to other crimes.
Child pornography has REAL VICTIMS: children that are being exploited and their lives are RUINED FOREVER.
There is no such thing for copyrights: did J.S. Bach write music in anticipation of licensing revenues? Is he a victim because he had no licensing revenue at that time? Is that comparable to an exploited 7 year old child?
You're thinking in legal terms, but in this case, the argument is one of morals.
CP and CI are galaxies apart morally, imho. Also, people's views on copyright infringement seem to immediately swell when it's their copyright being infringed upon.
censoring child porn websites: right, censoring copyright infringement website: wrong.
Not sure I understand the difference? Either you're for censorship of websites, or you're against it, you can't pick and choose.