> But in what kind of parallel universe does a professional, western police force think it’s appropriate, proportionate and a good use of tax-payers’ money to send officers to a citizen’s home for a petty file-sharing issue, one involving the downloading of a single music album?
That's just it. It's not a usage of taxpayers' money, it's a usage of government money that just so happens to have been taken forcefully from taxpayers. And when you phrase it as "government money," it's not at all surprising that its used this way. Just look at the relationships between a anti-piracy groups and government.
The so called anti-piracy groups are the real pirates - just a bunch of old, evil, filthy rich owners and CEOs, that would destroy the lives of countless young people without blinking.
Every single successful civilization/culture/religion in human history was based on sharing. The pirates, bribing politicians and police officers, across the western world are destroying the very fabric of our society. Plus the DRM, constant monitoring and logging of internet activity, war on open platforms, like Linux.
Hopefully this girl will create a paradigm shift. All of this anti-piracy prosecution makes me feel like im in a dystopian future where hearing music and watching movies is forbidden. :(
I wonder if that's part of why the geek community is fighting harder than most: we've all read a couple cyberpunk/farenheight-451-type books and realize that future is not as impossible as once thougnt.
I heard a great song on Spotify today, a service I pay for. Interestingly enough those payments are not for the music, just the ability to listen to the music, as I abruptly realized when I started contemplating using that song in a DJ mix.
Intellectual property is the Inquisition of our times.
Hopefully things will turn for the better and people of the future will see our outlawing of non-commercial sharing of data as one of those stupid things the troglodytes of the 21th century did. But IP will die a slow and ugly death.
The play The Crucible was not a cliche... The play was an allegory comparing the blacklisting of actors for suspected communist sympathies to the brutal humiliating executions of innocents for the invented crime of consulting with the devil.
The fact is that metaphors and allegories do not necessarily suggest the magnitude of compared incident are themselves comparable. Attacking such comparison for having an imbalance of severity is intellectually bankrupt. Reading suggestions of absolute equivalence into them is to not read them as an adult interested in mature conversation; but rather argument.
I didn't say it was. I said the phrase "witch hunt" is a cliche. "The Inquisition" isn't a cliche. "The Salem Witch Trials" isn't a cliche. "The Holocaust" isn't a cliche. "witch hunt" is a cliche.
Why would this girl be any different than the number of other people that have been prosecuted for piracy?
There hasn't really been any outrage beyond articles like this before, and there doesn't seem to be any outrage except articles like this now. The public at large doesn't seem to have a problem with any of it.
Because it's not quite the same when some employed 30 year old pirates something.
This case has an aura of "THINK OF THE KIDS!" - a scam that seems to be working with other issues, but this time in reverse. It's high time these %^&*-suckers got a taste of their own medicine.
I'm all for making a living our of art, but not like this.
MAFIAA kind of stuff must end now; they live in the past while ruining the future.
It won't be forbidden, the industry wants to make money! What will happen is that the microchip implanted in your brain at birth will recognize watermarks in any and all manner of copyrighted works and automatically charge the license fee from your bank account.
The problem with this matter is it's been done before. In 2000, pictures of Elian Gonzalez being face to face with swat forces caused only limited outrage. The public was exposed to that case so much that they pretty much got numb to the situation and were downright sick of hearing about it before the raid happened. If anything in overall U.S. Cuba relations changed, it probably had nothing to do with the kid.
It's not that different with regard to file sharing. We've been hearing horror stories over extreme anti-piracy tactics for close to 15 years now. Your average 20 year old doesn't know of a world where this sort of thing doesn't happen. So in this kind of environment, I just don't see how one little girl is going to change anything.
I think for most of us we have gone past the issues with semantics, that file sharing is no the same as stealing.
What I am more intersted in is how can content producers be fairly rewarded in this new world and what the future of content production looks like if there is less money for producers. Technology destroying some of the middle men should make producers more even with a smaller pie, which will help a bit.
File sharing has been around a long time and yet it still seems more quality content than ever is being produced, maybe the incentives are less of a problem than I think.
I think the problem is one of momentum. In any given timeframe, only x% of movies/tv productions/music albums/whatever is expected to make y% of the money. I would assume that the people who do the sums on this thing have the numbers nailed down pretty well, but every now and then a Star Wars or a Michael Jackson comes along and you get an outlier which injects a lot of capital into the industry.
So the numbers would be declining, but it's hard to know if this is specifically from file sharing, or just from an audience not engaged with a specific product. But the content investors don't know any other game, so they keep investing. It might take ten years of no big hits, no outliers before they decide the game has permanently changed.
And besides, maybe the ROI is so good that it can take a 50% cut and still be better than anything else they can easily get involved in.
When big industries peter out, it's usually not evident until hindsight has been introduced what was the point where it was no longer worth committing any capital. There is a lot of momentum pushing them along, particularly in very established demographics.
Eventually either a new way of earning cash from production will pop up, or, more likely, the returns to investors in entertainment will head back to the levels experienced by many other industries. The barriers to entry for new talent will be lower (less gatekeepers) but the overall outsized returns to a small number of individuals will probably permanently lower. Because it's hard to dominate an industry and make massive returns without structural, legislative or oligopolistic barriers to entry to competition.
I guess what remains to be seen, is that if outsized returns are off the table, whether you will still see big budget stuff that pushes the industry forward.
With something like Game Of Thrones you can see the results of a much bigger budget compared to things like Rome and Merlin. The new push towards virtual sets might be able to bridge the quality gap between the real big budget productions and lower budget content at the moment.
I doubt it will ever come to the point where high risk high reward big productions won't happen. It might happen a bit more rarely if the perceived risk goes up, but by doing so, the value of big productions goes up because so few are doing them, and you get a nice circular chain of events.
Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something, someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.
That being said with any form of piracy it is in effect stealing. If one were to go down to the local store and steal a product from the shelves and make a run for the doors, you will also be caught, brought up to the police, charged and taken before the courts.
Now is the methods being used by the record companies correct? probably not. But do they have a right to try and protect their profits from looters and moochers of the world? they sure do.
I think digital media is the way of the future, especially being able to access it from anywhere in the world with little or no effort.
I just think that piracy in this sense has been taken for granted for much to long and we should work towards naming it as it should be named and stop getting up and arms about it as much as we do and just pay for what we use instead of running off to the local torrent site and downloading the shit out of it.
The problem is this common analogy is completely off base. When you steal from a store, that store had purchased a physical product from a wholesaler. This is know as the "cost of goods sold." The store maintains an inventory of product for which they have already paid a significant sum of money in order to place it on the shelves.
When you steal from the store you remove an item from their inventory which they cannot sell. The cost of that item that was already paid now has to be covered by profits made up from selling other items in the inventory, thus increasing (albeit very little) the price of the rest of the inventory.
In other words, the physical good is moved from one place to another, depriving the original owner of its value.
File sharing, on the other hand, has no marginal cost to each "copy" of a file. If I write a song or software and put it on the internet, it costs me nothing if 1 or one million people share the file (assuming it's not my bandwidth to pay for). Also, if one user downloads my file it does not disappear or transfer from me to them. I do not have to manufacture another item. File sharing is copying. Stealing is transfer of ownership.
So, you cannot directly compare file sharing, which has no marginal cost, to physical items that have a marginal cost of production. What owners of copyrighted works are trying to recover are their fixed costs in producing the work.
This old dead horse doesn't need any more beating, but apparently the obvious has to be stated once again:
when you copy a digital "good" you don't deprive its owner from it. Therefore this is NOT stealing in any way. Not even remotely akin to stealing.
Let's get it straight a last time (I hope): if you have an apple and I take it, you haven't got it anymore. Digital goods are INFORMATION. When you give me an information YOU STILL F*CKING HAVE IT. By your twisted way of thinking, people reading headlines in papers at the store are burglars, and so are people reading the time on your watch without asking you first. This cannot be the case. This shouldn't be the case. This won't be the case.
Your twisting my words now, people pay for headlines with advertising and what not, we are talking about music or perhaps even movies, these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money, not for your enjoyment or for your friends enjoyment, them make it and package it.
Then someone comes downs rightfully buys it and enjoys the fruits of others labours.
What is not right is to reward artists by telling them that their hard work is just information free to be handed out to everyone, seriously call it what you want, you are stealing from these people. They don’t want you to give it to your friends or random people off the internet, they want you to pay for it.
If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.
> these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money
Just to make it clear: I've been a professional musician, a composer an arranger, and I've played with Touré Kunda and recorded with Deep Forest. I've also been a graphic artist and built the official TV CGs effects for World Cup 1998. I pretend to know quite a bit about why people (including myself) create music or art, and I can affirm you that even the worst commercial, tasteless eurodance artist doesn't do it for the money first. They want to perform their art first, then seek a way to get money while doing it.
Selling your art can take numerous forms. For musicians, most of the time the better part of their revenue comes from concerts and not recorded music (usually at best they get a few percents of a CD price anyway).
> you are stealing from these people.
I've only extremely rarely downloaded any media from the net, and only things unavailable by other ways. I'm standing on principles and not looking for excuses.
> If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.
> these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money
So? Disney produced "John Carter" expressly for money. Microsoft designed the Zune expressly for money. MySpace built their social networking platform expressly for money. Were their rights violated because these products were failures?
No one is guaranteed a positive return on their speculative ventures. People aren't entitled to be rewarded solely for effort, and they don't have the right to attempt to re-engineer other people's affairs in order to secure a higher payoff on their activities.
The argument isn't over whether it's a physical token that won't be available for sale. Even without a physical token it's still stealing.
If everyone were to just take digital content without paying for it, would this still be ok?
If so, why would anyone produce the digital content knowing they won't receive compensation?
And how does this apply to other non-digital marketplaces:
If you went to a dentist to have your teeth cleaned, would it be ok to never pay the dentist? After all, the dentist is still able to clean other teeth?
If you had your car towed to a mechanic, does the tow truck driver have to be paid?
"If so, why would anyone produce the digital content knowing they won't receive compensation?"
Why should we restrict freedom of information and create a huge Orwellian enforcement bureaucracy just to make it easier for a small segment of society to make money off digital content? If your business model requires forcibly prohibiting people to share strings of 1s and 0s to be successful, then find a better business model. If you can't, that's your problem.
I agree that content creators deserve respect and attribution, but the freedom to share information is much more important as a social principle.
Are we talking about "freedom of information" or are we talking about music, movies, tv shows, software and other content that was created for the sole purpose of economic income?
"Information" to me sounds like you're talking about something more fundamental, I'm just not sure what. But sharing copyrighted material should by no means be considered something that is a social principle.
"But sharing copyrighted material should by no means be considered something that is a social principle."
It is, in fact. My friends don't have to pay royalties to content creators when they look at paintings I have hanging up in my house, watch a movie I rented, or borrow a book from me. This isn't because we don't respect copyright as a society, but because we recognize that sharing is a natural human activity, and the measures required to enforce the prevention of such behavior would create a society without freedom or privacy that no one wants to live in.
For similar reasons, what I choose to upload and download on a p2p network is no one's business but mine and the peer I've connected to. They are in effect private conversations, and any legal system that requires monitoring of these private conversations will, carried to its logical conclusion, eliminate all privacy and freedom in digital life, since any single packet on the network, whether it's for email, web traffic, or any other use, could conceivably contain copyrighted bit sequences and therefore be marked for inspection. Similarly, every file on our computers would obviously need to be scanned at borders and other checkpoints to be sure no one had infringing bit sequences on their systems.
Look, there have been plenty of examples that show that a significant percentage of people are willing to pay for digital content even when they could otherwise obtain it freely through file sharing, whether out of respect content creators, or for the sake of quality and convenience. So this isn't a question of whether or not copyrighted digital content can survive--it's been well proven that it can survive and thrive. No, the question is whether we should allow a few entrenched stakeholders to trample our civil rights in order to milk a bit of extra revenue out of the system without having to innovate in response to new cultural norms.
Your civil rights aren't being trampled because it is illegal to download or upload and post online a 1080p rip of the latest Hollywood blockbuster for thousands to download easily.
You claim that these laws don't hurt civil rights because they are legally enforceable. This doesn't add up. Legality is irrelevant.
It's easy to fall into a pattern of accept government to be a definitive source of truth about political concepts. This is flawed thinking. Were the government to say that up was down, it would not make it any more true.
Likewise, when the government chooses to call something property doesn't mean that it is property by a reasonable definition.
The enforcement of content protection laws impede privacy, free speech, free expression and the principle of live and let live. It's a clear-cut imposition on civil rights.
It does? Why has this line of thinking just come about within the last 20 years or so when it became easy to pirate IP due to the emergence of mp3s and high speed Internet connections? All of the chatter above is just hand wringing trying to justify that your entertainment should be free because it is easy to obtain without getting in hot water.
My motives have nothing to do with free entertainment. Generally I find movies to be shit, but occasionally order one off amazon because I can afford it and can't be bothered with the hassle of managing a download. I love music (to perform) but don't listen to it because I find it distracting.
I'm interested in digging in hard on issues where the people in our time all seem to be blinkered to the truth. What are the issues where people in five hundred years will look back at us and say "how could they have been so [stupid/cruel/content]."
Copyright's one of them. It's not conducive to creativity, it doesn't reward creators. There's never been a public policy case made that explains why we have it, just vague hand-waving about how it's necessary for creation of production.
In order to enforce it the government needs to encroach on more and more freedoms.
For all its madness, copyright is generally accepted. Good people are made to feel guity for doing it, partly because of unsupported economic claims, and partly from bald-faced lies that smart people should see throuh, such as branding copyright infringement as 'stealing'.
Of course it rewards creators. Much of the content you read in your local bookstore or watch on TV wouldn't be made if the authors didn't have any system in place in which they could guarantee a return on their investment. Yes some people will do it for free, but many wouldn't have the ability to do so if they weren't able to sustain themselves.
The system we have makes some things possible but kills others, such as remixing which is the dominant mechanism for creativity when people are left to their own devices. It mandates a few business models and outlaws everything else. You can't review public policy just from its good effects, what's important is the opportunity cost.
There are some major flaws in your argument here. First, remember that someone creating content of any kind, digital or not, is not automatically entitles to compensation. Even in the days of CDs, someone had to physically buy the discs for them to make money--and if the music sucked, they didn't. There are plenty of reasons why someone would create content without expecting to be directly paid for it: reputation, enjoyment, contributing to the sum of human knowledge and the human experience. Why do scientists do research? Yes, they are salaried, but they are not getting paid for their "content" specifically; their research is released into the world for free (hidden only behind journal pay walls, a separate issue).
As for your comment on non digital domains, it suffers from the same flaw as previous arguments above. When you get your teeth cleaned or your car towed, it is NOT true that the dentist for example could still clean other teeth. He can in the future, but during the time he cleaned your teeth, he could have been cleaning someonje else's teeth but wasn't because he was cleaning yours. There is an opportunity cost there. With digital files, there is no such cost. It makes no difference whatsoever to a file or its creator whether it is shared one time or a thousand, since the creator isn't doing anything differently nor investing incremental time or money for each additional share.
You're getting downvoted for willfully conflating two different terms in a game of semantics in order to muddy the waters in support of your argument, you arrogant little shit.
>Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something,
That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it.
Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely.
> someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.
But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind.
What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours.
Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies.
Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.
And that's the mental gymnastic that lets people steal all sorts of intellectual property - they rationalize it, pretend it isn't somebody's property and livelihood, and take it mostly because they just want it and its hard to secure so it ok, right?
If I'm not willing to pay him, then he's not owed anything. Hey! I'm not willing to pay for lots of things; now I can just take them. Thanks, Gormo! I'm free of social responsibility!
The only mental gymnastic present here is your repeated attempt to create some kind of equivalence between intangible concepts and physical objects by using words like "property" and "stealing". In reality, the concept of property only has meaning with respect to rival goods, and it's impossible to "steal" conceptual content from people without performing lobotomies on them.
Your property rights extend to allowing you to assert exclusive physical ownership over the items that you have created or acquired through voluntary trade. Note that the concept of voluntary trade implies that making a living by taking advantage of speculative commercial opportunities is necessarily excluded from the scope of your rights: your ability to make a profit through trade is definitionally contingent on other people's willingness to do business with you. The commercial viability of your work is necessarily other people's "property".
When the work you're doing produces physical goods that you intend for sale, the distinction between your property rights in the goods themselves and your access to the commercial opportunities present for selling those goods may be blurred, since both are invoked via the physical object itself. But the distinction is still present: no one is obligated to purchase your widgets, but neither may anyone deprive you of those widgets without your consent.
But in the realm of pure ideas, which are intangible and non-rival, the distinction is much clearer: it's physically impossible for someone to steal your ideas. The best they can do is make their own separate copies of those ideas; they can't deprive you the product of your work itself. By making their own copies, all they're depriving you of is the opportunity to sell the idea to them. But, as we saw above, that opportunity was never yours in the first place; it was always contingent on their consent rather than yours.
Attempting to use positive law to create artificial "property rights" in purely conceptual "goods" is akin to a farmer lobbying for laws which punish people for keeping their own vegetable gardens. You're attempting to re-engineer the circumstances of other people's lives in order to force them to be your customers. The reality is that "intellectual property" policies violates other people's real rights in order to mitigate the risks of speculators, so I think it's safe to say that by advocating such a policy, you've already abandoned any pretense of "social responsibility".
"Because the public are angry, politicians will be nervous too, and uncooperative politicians are bad news for tougher copyright law. But in the short term anyone sent a “pay-up-or-else” letter from CIAPC (if they even dare to send any more) will be thinking long and hard about paying. The chances of the police coming next time must be slimmer than last week.
And the fact that they will be able to thank a child for that is why this is some of the best news all year."
This "piracy war" is starting to look more and more like the drug war. I could see how in US especially, if marijuana is going to be legalized, all those agencies which would now be left out of work, could refocus on raiding "pirates", barging in and shooting people's dogs, and whatnot. Then this parody might become a reality (the part with the girl at the end):
Try your analogy again when this piracy war has killed 55,000 people. That is the estimated death toll from just the Mexican drug war that "started" less than 6 years ago (by official tally).
The Mexican drug war and the US war on drugs are completely different things... In the Mexican drug war, rival drug warlords massacre dozens of civilians because they think they'll be used as mules by the other side; the government then come in force to try to re-establish order in the region. It's more of a civil war, or a war against bandit warlords, or a war against corruption that buys off entire police departments. It's almost a civil war.
The US drug war is mostly an unnecessary but lucrative obsession with jailing people for minor marijuana offenses, at least domestically speaking.
They are not completely different things. The US war on drugs drives the Mexican drug war. Without the US as consumers, the situation in Mexico would be very different. While they are not exactly the same, it is not accurate to think of them as completely different things.
Yes of course things are linked. But javinskie's post makes it sound like the 55,000 deaths are the Mexican government's fault alone. While the Mexican government is no doubt not the most effective, the druglord themselves are massacring people. Whereas in the US, it is the government causing the most damage on its own, by overly incentivizing the incarceration of minor drug offenders. And it is this government over-enforcement that is the parallel to the copyright issue at heart. Not the near civil war in another country that is partly linked to it.
If marijuana and other drugs were legalized, there wouldn't be drug lords with private armies to begin with. They would disappear just like American mobsters at the end of Prohibition.
afterburner clearly understands this. His point is that in the US drug war, it is the government of the United States that is the main antagonist. This is not the case in with the ongoing violence in Mexico.
My point is that drug prohibition remains the root cause. Even in America, most of the actual harm is done by gangsters rather than the government. And yes, I'm aware that organized crime still exists in the United States, but not to nearly the same extent as during alcohol prohibition.
No they wouldn't, they'd still be there but in far less number. Legal weed is expensive, there will always be $20/8th alternatives out there from mexico to compete with $60/8th legal stuff.
It will be no different than it is in california. Adults buy the legal stuff, and unemployed people and highschool kids buy the mexican stuff.
Marijuana is never gonna be legalized in US. The current private prison system, the ghettos, supplying soldiers (most with fathers in jail) for the military, etc. works too well for the elite to be messed with.
Eventually this will just make people transfer to, for example, I2P torrents or something.
It takes one good effort that bundles the I2P codebase, the required plugins and an I2P BitTorrent client such as Robert into a single application that just launches with one click of the mouse and without any further configuration needed and provides a browser view to the I2P torrent trackers as well as the BitTorrent client itself (or the equivalent hops for some other onion style network) and you're pretty much set for genuinely anonymous BitTorrent masses.
These systems, such as I2P and Tor, are designed to be resilient against oppressive governments so the MAFIAA just don't have a chance if the traffic goes underground. What next? MAFIAA would try to make it illegal to use your computer for anything else than connecting to pre-approved websites with MAFIAA approved browsers? Gimme a break.
I read this comic when I was a child. I was appalled by the cruelty of this scene. It was about illegal artifacts from different time but I it really comes to mind when I'm reading the story of that girl today.
It's not good to have nine years old girl used in propaganda.
We can't prevent this from happening but we should not force it.
It's halfway as bad as using child porn fear to censor "pirates". Even half of that is still very bad.
That's just it. It's not a usage of taxpayers' money, it's a usage of government money that just so happens to have been taken forcefully from taxpayers. And when you phrase it as "government money," it's not at all surprising that its used this way. Just look at the relationships between a anti-piracy groups and government.