Copyright hoarders (not necessarily content creators) consider anyone sharing the content they hold copyright to as competition and attack will full fury, destroying humans' lives and jamming the local jurisdictions. They use all available strategies - top-down (PB in Sweden), bottom-up (cease and desist letter plague in Germany). How anyone competent allows them for doing it is unimaginable, there must be fraud and corruption involved.
It's not all black and white though. Pirating torrent site realistically don't care if pirated stuff is from copyright hoarder or content creator. It's easy to say "those corporate money grabbers are evil" but in reality nobody cares who to pirate from. I've seen one writer who was relatively popular, beg his readers to buy his books instead of pirating it, because publisher was going to end his contract, because it was just not very profitable with all the pirating. I fail to see glory for pirating in that.
One programmer I knew decided to do shareware in early 2000-s. His program became pretty successful in several months (2-3x times larger revenue than average salary in the country at the time), he could live off it. First time he got cracked and program went on pirating sites his sales were damaged considerably, he added some protection, new features etc. After some time he got cracked again and sales were damaged again. This time he said "screw it", stopped working on the program and got regular job. I fail to see glory for pirating in that.
Of course I understand the appeal of pirated content, sometimes it's the only usable way to get something, especially for some old movies/series. And it put pressure on large media companies for content delivery technologies etc. But it's not all fun and giggles, it's a complex issues requiring global discussion and compromises.
> It's not all black and white though. Pirating torrent site realistically don't care if pirated stuff is from copyright hoarder or content creator. It's easy to say "those corporate money grabbers are evil" but in reality nobody cares who to pirate from.
Some do, some don't.
I don't doubt your anecdotes, but I doubt it's true as a pattern.
Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.
The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?
If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge). For two reasons: He wouldn't have read as much as he did, and he couldn't have borrowed as much as he did for his works.
We want some kind of middleground. Creators should be compensated, but complete all-encompassing DRM means only a fraction of people would've watched Game of Thrones to discuss it at the water cooler, Kanye West (regardless of what you think of his music) wouldn't be able to release most of his music, etc.
I've never seen a torrent site which wouldn't let torrents because "oh, it's individual developer's program, we don't allow those". I would say that overwhelming majority of people who created pirate sites (or created/sold illegal compact discs before that) didn't care about who to pirate from. And practically all shareware developers felt it.
> Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.
I've never said it did, and of course it doesn't. And I think pretty much everyone here understands it. I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.
> The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?
I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy... And there's a lot of areas where it's hard to pin point the exact place for some dividing line, but everyone can see the difference between entities: like where you put exact line between colors on a rainbow? But you know that green isn't yellow and red isn't blue, you don't need to know where that line is exactly.
> If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge)
I don't how that would make Shakespeare read less, since he couldn't download a book on his phone anyway, and he probably read many books which weren't owned by him, since they were pricey and that price was mostly behind materials of the book and work to create this physical object.
But he might or he might not exist, it's hard to say. It's not certain that writing would be less developed, if there were more effects of copyright. Being able to benefit from writing more could motivate more people to write, so it's hard to say what would have happen. Would we will be on the same level of technical progress if there were not patents (yes, there's a lot of ridiculous and bogus things about it now, but I'm talking about history) in previous 200-300 years, when inventors were motivated to create new things by legal protection of the right to benefit from it? Hard to say with certainty (though I incline to the "less advanced" answer).
> I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy...
No it's not. Mp3s are compressed, x264 rips are compressed, digital texts are not the same as books.
Do you mean that they are "almost a perfect representation of the original work"? Because that is closer to reality, and also telling.
Someone over a 100 years ago thought that a black and white movie sped up with just a few frames per second was a convincing representation of a train running towards you in a crowded cinema.
Some people think that bad covers of songs are good enough of a substitute over the real thing.
Stories told before writing was invented was basically transcoded and compressed and corrupted, and humanity would be immensely more stupid if we had not "allowed" that.
Please pay creative people and content creators, but locking down content to people who would otherwise not pay for it regardless is just regressive, on top of never actually working.
> > Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales.
> I've never said it did
You didn't provide any specific numbers, but seemed to be arguing with your two anecdotes that piracy (as opposed to simply natural market/product factors) caused so many lost sales it put people out of business.
> I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.
Perhaps for the same reason you replied to a post about copyright hoarders using stringent legal methods and talked about something else entirely; because, to quote you, things are "not all black and white".
I've developed my own golden rule: if something is 5 years or older its public domain.
TPB and digital piracy in general functions as a library of Alexandria. Nobody in our society gives a shit about keeping things available. It's all about NOW and MONEY. So much entertainment would be lost without the internet.
There are a lot of great artists who put out work that doesn't catch on until 5+ years after they make it. It seems like a large social problem if such creators can't be rewarded for their work; given that this kind of work is usually the most innovative, it could lead to a creative stagnation.
But the problem, just like with patents, is that there a many kinds of actors in our modern world, including large companies who couldn't really care less. A company like Disney would, I think, be more motivated by a 5 or 10 year copyright period, as it would require them to keep on producing and innovating.
If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system anyway.
> If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system anyway.
This is a really stunning claim and one that needs a lot more defense than you're giving it. I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old. I'd be happy to furnish a list if such a thing is necessary, but as it is your statement seems absurd on the face of it.
olau: If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system
maldusiecle: I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old
I'd love to see more support for both sides of this argument. My guess would be that olau and maldusiecle may not have much overlap in the list of artists that they consider innovative. I'm probably closer to olau's position: while there are artists who benefit from copyright, they tend to be the ones who have chosen to concentrate on the commercial potential of their work rather than innovation. And I'd guess that most of those who are "doing art for art's sake" would do as well or better under a much less restrictive copyright regime.
Is your argument seriously that since innovative artists are a small minority, it's necessarily alright to harm them? You don't see any problem with that?
Not very innovative if somebody expects to live the rest of their life on the royalties of one book or movie. And realistically who can do that anyway? In popular culture?
Yes, I've been thinking about something similar. Some time limit for individual's liability might be a good compromise. If you could wait to get some things free for personal use later without being in danger of legal problems it can remove the pressure from people... And on other hand if you really, really, really want to watch that freshest movie of an audio album right now, paying for it seems reasonable? Those who ca wait probably wouldn't pay for it in the first place, so copyright holders won't lose that much, at the same time keeping happy "long tail" of people who don't want rare/old things to vanish without means to access it. I wouldn't say that it's public domain though, because I still don't think it's ok to profit from it, like just downloading a book/movie and selling it or something like that.
And yes. Every photocopy a text book? Ever trace out a comic book panel or other image? Ever make copies of a photo (obviously more common digitally, but could be done in the film age too) that you didn't take originally? I've done all of them, they're all things I'm not legally entitled to do.
France has this notion of private copy, where you can legally copy basically anything you want as long as you keep it to yourself, your family, and maybe some of your friends. Check your legislation. It may allow what you're talking about already. (Though I agree with you even if it doesn't.)
With the substantial limitation that the source must be "legal", i.e. you can't copy something from a torrent for example since it is likely the uploader didn't put it here legally.
I'm not even sure the sources must be authorised to publish the works for you to be able to copy it from them without legal repercussion. Our Hadopi law doesn't punish download, it punishes upload (more precisely, the fact that someone uploaded something from your network). Definitely not a lawyer, though.
I feel like there is a key difference in all the examples people are giving. Taking a picture of a text book for personal use is a only a small part of the complete work closer would be scanning the entire thing. Further assuming you keep it to personal use it's also very different than spreading it to others.
Oh, I didn't say the textbook was -my- textbook. From the library or from a friend, getting the relevant bits we needed was super common, because the textbooks were infrequently referenced and super expensive for many classes.
But, to the OP's point, I totally agree digital changes the equation. But it should also change the law. Theoretically having an img tag that references someone else's site could be thought of as illegal, after all. I'm reproducing the work without authorization, and even making money from it (ad impressions on my site rather than the hosting site), -while costing the original site money- (since they still pay the hosting and bandwidth costs). Digital changed -everything-, because the cost to copy went to 0. The laws have not kept up.
Some people really don't get the distinction between moral vs legal. I have actually seen a law student say that they were against legalizing pot, because smoking it is immoral because it's illegal. And he couldn't see how that argument made no sense.
While that argument may make no sense to you or me, it makes just as much objective "sense" as any other moral basis. Some people are strict utilitarians, some people have a deontological code, some people's morals come out of a holy book, and some people equate moral with legal. None of them are "correct" or "incorrect," and they absolutely do not make "sense."
The other systems you mention may or may not be arbitrary, but at least they're not circular. The reasoning "It's immoral because it's illegal and it's illegal because it's immoral" is unsound because it's circular. Disagreeing over your base set of axioms is one thing, but circular reasoning is quite another.
Under a circular legal moral system, moral progress would hinge on new understanding of old laws or else nominally morally neutral changes to the law. The other systems more easily promote moral progress via new understanding. Utilitarians can have new insights into utility functions. Religious based morality can have life experience and new cultural understandings influence their understanding and consequences of their basic commands.
I agree. And this is why I no longer pirate stuff, if I can get it legally in a reasonable way. For me as a non-american though, there is a serious lack of content available to me, which means that if I want to watch something, sometimes the only available option is to pirate it.
That's a much less sympathetic position. It's one thing if there's literally no way to consume a piece of content. The copyright holders aren't losing money there. It's another if there's a perfectly viable method available but you want to put on your toddler voice and say "but I don't want it that way."
I wouldn't call forcing ads in as "a perfectly viable way" to watch something, especially on an already paid service. Is it a perfectly viable way to eat dinner at a restaurant if the chef takes your plate away from you mid bite several times so that you can listen to his friend try and sell you shit?
If it's free + ads I could agree, but most content sellers are just trying to get paid twice
> I wouldn't call forcing ads in as "a perfectly viable way" to watch something, especially on an already paid service
US Cable television already fits that description. Almost 100 million Americans pay a monthly subscription for television content which still includes ads. For that matter, HBO itself is already an extra additional fee on top of that prior subscription.
Your restaurant comparison seems particularly disingenuous considering commercials are a pretty normal aspect of television consumption.
I don't know if you're aware, but cable was billed as an adless way to get the because you were _already_ paying for it. Then the companies flip flop Ed and started putting ads in. Just because they've gotten away with it for a long time doesn't make it ok. It's not ok for me to punch you in the face even if I've been doing it for 20 years with no consequence.
If we take your argument as well, then piracy is perfectly fine because people have been doing it for a long time and it's become a normal aspect of the consumption.
I've always found it interesting that part of the issue gets ignored. Those people who are running around online downloading and uploading? They're beating the copyright holders at their job. The primary purpose for existence of publishers for centuries was to master the problem of distribution. Now, any clever 12 year old can run circles around these huge organizations in their spare time for fun. It's like if tomorrow kids became able to slap together Lambourghinis in their backyard. Except if 90% of our economy was based on producing Lambourghinis. Because distribution was the problem that drove the global economy. It was the reason why factories won out over village craftsmen. It's the reason we live in cities. It's the reason we educate our kids the way we do, why we structure companies the way we do, etc. Solving the problem of distribution was basically what our economy existed for for a century. And now... it's literally child's play.
This is quite a bit larger than copyright, but obviously media is the first place where it became very obvious that distribution is no longer a worthwhile problem to solve as it has been commoditized by computers and the Internet.
So how do we bring back money to production of media then, ensuring that the people who spend time producing it can afford a decent standard of living?
Prior to YouTubes efforts to destroy it, the model they were using is a great one (although there are substantial problems with its implementation). Patreon is emerging as a great way to support creators. People are more than willing to pay for the creation of media and that has not changed. What has changed is that there is no reason to enrich the people who distribute the media. Distribution was a Big Deal. It was the primary driver of the entire global economy for a century. Every big company fundamentally solved the problem of distribution. Sometimes they did other things, but it was all ancillary to distribution. Now, distribution is a solved problem. It's a commodity. Anyone can do it, and because newcomers don't have the burden of overhead and infrastructure and entrenched contractual entanglements that the old guard have hanging around their necks like a noose, newcomers can run circles around those giant companies. And if they had the integrity to stick to their claimed love of the market they held for so long, their companies would shrink dramatically.
The Internet makes it possible for creators to have a decent standard of living. A tremendous number of them can have that decent standard of living. As opposed to a handful of owners of distribution companies living in opulence. An entirely capitalist redistribution of wealth on a large scale. That is viscerally disgusting to many who see those very large companies as the pillars holding our society aloft. To them it looks like rats chewing through the pillars.
