EU ACTA Doc Shows Plans For Global DMCA, 3 Strikes 406
An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission analysis of ACTA's Internet chapter has leaked, indicating that the US is seeking to push laws that extend beyond the
WIPO Internet treaties and beyond current European Union law. The
document contains detailed comments on the US secret copyright treaty
proposal, confirming the desire to promote a 'three-strikes and you're
out' policy, a Global DMCA, harmonized contributory copyright
infringement rules, and the establishment of an international
notice-and-takedown policy."
Re:Global government (Score:5, Insightful)
DOA in the US Senate (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think this treaty would pass in the US Senate. I would forsee the unlikely coalition of far rightists and far leftists actually collaborating to defeat this, just as they actually have on some other things.
Re:Global government (Score:5, Insightful)
The goal is undermining the freedom of all people.
Re:Global government (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Means nothing. (Score:3, Insightful)
thousands of government bureaucrats (Score:5, Insightful)
versus
millions of teenagers who are
1. technologically astute
2. media hungry
3. POOR
let them pass any goddamn law they want. who fucking cares?
its nothing more than damage to route around, like the internet was designed to do
Re:Obama ? Come on ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes blame Obama. He picked Biden as his running mate and he isn't any more innocent in regard to the actual treaty than Bush was.
Re:A Plea to the Rest-of-the-World (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the rest of the world's jo to restrain our leaders. It is OUR JOB to restrain our leaders.
Re:How would this fly (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think that after all that has happened in the last decade, people would stop being so surprised when our bloated government abuses its power *again*.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:5, Insightful)
People like you are as much a problem as Big Media's absurd power grabs. You are unashamedly breaking the law, which makes you the poster boy for Big Media when they are pushing for ever more extreme laws. And while you will deserve it if you ever get screwed by those laws, lots of people will wind up suffering through no fault of their own if these measures go through.
Re:thousands of government bureaucrats (Score:2, Insightful)
I care, when I voice an unpopular opinion and those in power cut off my internet access because "I've been downloading media" regardless of the reality of the situation.
Re:Global government (Score:3, Insightful)
ROW is already just as corrupt as the US.
get your head out of your patriotic ass. corruption knows no country or ethnic boundaries. if you are human, you are corruptable.
its a wave right now. all countries are joining in. they love it! their leaders, that is. the citizens all hate it. but their needs were NEVER important. any illusion of that was just that, an illusion.
you are either in power or not in power. and those in-power right now are enjoying a huge rape-fest of those that are not in-power.
but this is WAY beyond any one country. its a WAVE and all leaders are enjoying the anti-freedom wave right now.
sorry for the wake-up call. you can go back to your disney view of the world if you really want to, I guess...
Re:DOA in the US Senate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DOA in the US Senate (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think this treaty would pass in the US Senate. I would forsee the unlikely coalition of far rightists and far leftists actually collaborating to defeat this, just as they actually have on some other things.
Errr, have you got any "far leftists" in your senate?
Re:thousands of government bureaucrats (Score:3, Insightful)
its nothing more than damage to route around, like the internet was designed to do
The media barons out there are saying "Internet piracy is nothing more than damage to route around or snuff out, like the global media conglomerates were designed to do."
"Failing" is a bit harsh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Global government (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Global government (Score:3, Insightful)
Do it. Make it into a law. It's called due fucking process.
The RIAA only worked with lawsuits now because they are all CIVIL cases.
If people start randomly getting arrested without due process for no reason like the RIAA randomly does with potshots, there will be hell.
Make it into criminal cases. There will be blood of executives on the streets, I guarantee it.
Re:thousands of government bureaucrats (Score:3, Insightful)
By successfully censoring commercial art and removing it from the Internet, these clowns only help us to popularize the free-as-in-freedom art. I agree: let them pass more copyright laws if they so desire. Unlike with patents, nothing of value will be lost.
look at the growth of disk space for $100 (Score:5, Insightful)
By 2025 (at the current rate of advance sustained over the last 30 years) a TB of disk storage will cost about a penny. For $100, you will be able to buy a hard drive that will hold 2.5 *centuries* of HD video. While that might not be enough to hold all of mankind's copyrighted media, it will be more than enough to hold more media of whatever format will be in use in 2025 than a person could reasonably consume in their lifetime.
http://brownzings.blogspot.com/2009/11/disruptive-change.html [blogspot.com]
The point is, if we copyright any and every scrap of content produced, and maintain the same sorts of restrictions on such content that we enforce at the current time plus all the restrictions of the ACTA.... We will have no legal way to use a storage card we might get as a prize in a Cracker Jack box, much less a drive we actually buy.
And if people can carry around cheap storage sufficiently large to simply clone everyone's media libraries who they might meet, to sort out what they want later, who needs the Internet to "pirate"? (Thus what would be the real use of "Three Strikes"?)
When I write a joke, it is copyrighted. But jokes are so easy to repeat, and so hard to track that there isn't any way I can be paid for each time my joke gets retold. When media becomes easier to pass along than a joke, how can anyone require a payment for each retelling? There are other ways to be compensated, and the entertainment industry is going to have to learn to live with Moore's Law just like any high tech company does. Learn to leverage the efficiencies they gain with better technology to offset the loss of revenue that occurs as technology eliminates sources of income.
Live Concerts, Movie Theaters, endorsement deals, Shirts, and other value adds (plus who-knows what value adds might arise in the future) may be where the entertainment industry will have to go. Cheap (and I don't mean $10, or $5, or even $3) downloads of non DRM movies would bring in plenty of income from those that simply don't want to bother with other services.
Life is tough as technology takes away your income. But we are not going to kill the advance of technology, as much as the entertainment industry would like us to.
Perfect Place to Post This (Score:1, Insightful)
We tell ourselves that in America we are the Free People. I wonder whether we might not better be called the Obedient People, the Passive People, or the Admonished People. I doubt that any country, anywhere, has been so regulated, controlled, and directed as we are. We are bred to obey. And obey we do.
It begins with the sheer volume of law, rules, and administrative duties. Most of the regulation makes sense in isolation, or can be made plausible. Yet there is so much of it.
Used to be if you wanted a dog, you got a dog. It wasn’t really the government’s business. Today you need a dog license, a shot card for the dog, a collar and tags, proof that the poor beast has been neutered, and you have to keep it on a leash and walk it only in designated places. It’s all so we don’t get rabies.
Or consider cars. You have to have a title, insurance, and keep it up to date; tags, country sticker, inspection sticker, emissions test. Depending where you are, you can’t have chips in the windshield, and you need a zoned parking permit. You have to wear a seatbelt. And of course there are unending traffic laws. You can get a ticket for virtually anything, usually without knowing that you were doing anything wrong.
Then there’s paperwork. If you have a couple of daughters with college funds in the stock market, annually you have to fill out three sets of federal taxes, three sets of state, and file four state and four federal estimated tax forms, per person, for a total of twenty-four. This doesn’t include personal property taxes for the country, business licenses, tangible business-assets forms, and so on.
Now, I’m not suggesting that all these laws are bad. Stupid, frequently, but evil, no. Stopping at traffic lights is probably a good idea, and certainly is if I’m crossing the street. But the laws never end. Bring a doughnut on the subway, and you get arrested. Don’t replace your windows without permission in writing from the condo association. Nothing is too trivial to be regulated. Nothing is not some government’s business.
I wonder whether the habit of constant obedience to infinitely numerous rules doesn’t inculcate a tendency to obey any rule at all. By having every aspect of one’s life regulated in detail, does one not become accustomed to detailed regulation? That is, detailed obedience?
For many it may be hard to remember freer times. Yet they existed. In 1964, when I graduated from high school in rural Virginia, there were speed limits, but nobody much enforced them, or much obeyed them. If you wanted to fish, you needed a pole, not a license. You fished where you wanted, not in designated fishing zones. If you wanted to carry your rifle to the bean field to shoot whistle pigs, you just did it. You didn’t need a license and nobody got upset.
To buy a shotgun in the country store, you needed money, not a background check, waiting period, proof of age, certificate of training, and a registration form. If your tail light burned out, then you only had one tail light. If you wanted to park on a back road with your girl friend, the cops, all both of them, didn’t care. If you wanted to swim in the creek, you didn’t need a Coast Guard approved life jacket.
It felt different. You lived in the world as you found it, and behaved because you were supposed to, but you didn’t feel as though you were in a white-collar prison. And if anybody had asked us, we would have said that the freedom was worth more to us than any slightly greater protection against rabies, thank you. Which nobody ever got anyway.
Today, the Mommy State never leaves off protecting us from things I’d just as soon not be protected from. We must wear a helmet on a motorcycle: Kevorkian can kill us, but we cannot kill ourselves. Why is it Mommy
Equal Enforcement? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just for curiosity's sake, could we ensure the following if these laws get passed?
Company A becomes convicted of copyright infringement 3 times
Company A loses permanent access to the internet
I'm sure that Time Warner, Sony, et. al. have all been convicted of copyright infringement at least 3 times. Can we have their access to the internet permanently revoked?
Re:A Plea to the Rest-of-the-World (Score:5, Insightful)
would you please, PLEASE restrain my country's insane leaders?
We'd love to, but right now we're having trouble restraining our own insane leaders. I'm not sure quite how we ended up with leaders - I thought I was voting for people to represent me, not lead me.
Re:Global government (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't about expanding any one country's paradigm, it's about imposing the worst-common-denominator.
Re:A Plea to the Rest-of-the-World (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the majority of Americans thought that they corrected the mistakes they made 9 and 5 years ago when they elected the most recent idiot to office. Unfortunately they just brought a whole new idiot with a whole different secret agenda.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Once something is ripped, you don't need any special tools to copy it.
That is the core of why DRM is so absurd. It only takes one guy with a cracking tool to give access to the other 6 billion of us.
Re:A Plea to the Rest-of-the-World (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to do your job, you'd have to vote them out of office. But you cant vote them out because your system in practice allows only two parties. The US hasnt had a third party winning somwhere since more than 100 years. 300 Million citizens and only _two_ fscking parties to vote for, every god-forgotten country-so-small-you-cant-find-on-the-map from the Balcans would laugh its collective ass off about calling that "democracy".
Add to that the fact that, at least regarding copyright, the two US parties basically agreed to form a cartel (MAFIAA isnt called MAFIAA for nothing), and youre simply out of luck.
Re:Obama ? Come on ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this treaty isn't a left/right thing (ACTA originated under the Bush administration, and the Obama administration is carrying on with it). Almost universally, the public hates it and the government loves it (save for a few principled politicians on both sides).
I'm unabashedly liberal, and I believe that there are places where the government can do a lot of good. This is definitely not one of those times. Rather than pointing fingers at other voters, what we need to do as the American public is band together and fight this thing.
Re:Global government (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you underestimate the pacifism of most Americans. They just don't care anymore.
240 years ago the men that founded the USA were running away from what we have become. Freedom has given way to corporations needs and our ever more difficult struggle to maintain our standard of living. We need a revolt, but I just don't see that happening. Just look at even more repressed countries like Iran and North Korea.
The time has come and gone to make peaceful change, but the country will have to descend much farther into the depths of hell before people will get off their ass and make a change.
Re:DOA in the US Senate (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm kind of hoping the treaty gets signed and we just never ratify it. The rest of the world will feel like idiots for participating in this corporate coup d'etat.
I hope, if our own cannot that at least other countries can realize the internet is not a media gateway but is basic infrastructure like water and highways.
This is not Disney's internet.
This is not Sony's internet.
This is not Microsoft's internet.
It belongs to the people who designed it, the corporations who built it, and the citizens who paid for it all.
Re:Obama ? Come on ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Pansies! Why vote for the lesser evil?
Vote for the guy that will ruin the government, then we might have a chance at getting something new...
MAFIAA owns the mainstream media (Score:4, Insightful)
I seriously doubt we'll here anything negative on the mainstream media about ACTA.
I share this doubt. The only major TV news outlet that's not MAFIAA-owned is PBS. All the rest share a corporate parent with an MPAA member: NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC are with Universal Studios, ABC is with Disney, CBS is with Paramount in National Amusements, and Fox News is with 20th Century Fox in News Corp.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not really. I'm not in the share-everything-cause-you-can boat but this has become something like destroying a persons life for jay-walking.
We rally against such laws because they become increasingly divorced from the reality of modern human existance.
When the media distribution companies decide to join us and work with the rest of the modern population maybe something less rediculous or radical will result.
Blame news media in bed with the MAFIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
Blame the corrupt entertainment industry that lobbies our lawmakers into betraying the very people who elected them.
One can't get elected without the exposure that the news media offers. Look at how the press buried Ron Paul, for instance. I'd blame the lack of separation of news media and fictional entertainment: NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News are all owned by MPAA members.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Fashion Industry.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It's called "not having copyright," and it was good enough to give us Shakespeare and Milton. ...why? Hollywood comes up with maybe two worthwhile ideas a year. Before I fight you on that one, I'd like to hear your explanation of any system that will actually cause people to produce and share high-quality movies, since it sure isn't happening now.
Really, what's the problem here? Are we worried about musicians? The vast majority of popular musicians would make more money working at a 7-11 than they do during their time on the market under the major labels.
Are we worried about books? People have been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. The publishing industry is collapsing under its own weight, because of the abundance of free content out there (since the Internet appears to prove that people prefer "free" to "good").
Are we worried about movies?
Really, for someone with a sig protesting the power of the state, you seem awfully chipper about "property" that's been wholly invented by the government.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:3, Insightful)
You think Homer wouldn't have written The Odyssey if they'd been no copyright? Oh wait
If it's human nature to produce great works of art (including music) people are gonna do it regardless.
Re:look at the growth of disk space for $100 (Score:3, Insightful)
And exactly what would the 'per capacity tax" be on a $100 drive in 2025, which could be 100 PB (or 100,000 TB, or 100,000,000 GB for the PB or TB challenged) or more?
Canada charges $0.29 per CD (via wikipedia). That's about 48 cents per GB.
I guess the capacity charge would be 50 million dollars per $100 drive?
Yeah, that would work.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:1, Insightful)
high quality work *is* created that is shared freely. file sharing has only increased hollywood's revenue. show me a system where anyone can copy anything without restriction *doesn't* work.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Perhaps it's true that most popular musicians would be better off working at 7-11... but if that were true they'd be spending their time working at 7-11, not making music. So that doesn't actually address the point.
2. Gutenberg invented his press in 1436. Copyright was invented in Venice in 1486, a mere 50 years later. So no, people have not been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. Again, that doesn't address the point.
3. With movies your argument basically boils down to 'movies suck anyway,' which is a pretty subjective statement. The 'poor quality' in your view certainly hasn't prevented Hollywood from being popular. Certainly, it produces works good enough to encourage people to break the law to view them. So again, this doesn't address the point.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. The point being, strong monetary incentives are not necessary for people to produce quality works (or whatever passes for it) in the music business.
2. So now no books were written prior to 1486? Pfft. Besides, early copyright was (1) laughably poorly enforced, and (2) primarily intended to ensure the accuracy of the text, rather than the profitability of the print shop.
3. It produces works terrible enough that people won't watch them on the terms offered by the market. "People won't pay to see your movie" is not a strong argument of the movie's quality. In any event, my point here was just that I don't care if Hollywood rots. If there's that much demand for its content, someone will fund it somewhere.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few. There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer. Not a shred. Indeed, recent studies concerned with measuring the dependence of artistic output on copyright term length failed to find anything statistically meaningful (citation on request). If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day. At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting. Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy. Why does a pizza parlor owner have to bake pizzas to make a living and an artist can sit on his hands after drawing just one painting? If you try to address this issue, you will probably say something about inability to recoup costs in case of big-budget projects like movies, but this is bullshit. You will still have to explain why a monopoly is the best way (for a consumer!) to pay for these projects, while other perfectly sound ways of raising funds are known and used today (citation on request).
Re: Time to improve on TOR / Freenet (Score:5, Insightful)
Now is the time to start financing the guys who work on the TOR and Freenet protocols
Re:Perfect Place to Post This (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of what you said is wrong, even if I don't, necessarily agree with the OP's rabid rant.
"I own my home and the ground its on so I can do what I damn well please."
This depends, entirely, on where in the US you live. Many, many parts of this country (especially in and around cities) have zoning laws that restrict what you can and can't do on your land (examples: no cars on blocks, no loud noises at all hours, building size limited based on lot size, zoning board final approval over what you want to build, etc.). You can get away from much of this by living way out in the country, but even that isn't a gaurantee. Then (as mentioned by someone else in this thread) there are eminent domain laws which say that the government can take your land at any time as long as they pay you for it. You may not like it, but they are the law.
"Pet regulations aren't just for rabies, they are humanitarian so we don't have streets teeming with unvaccinated starving wild dogs and feral cats like Calcutta. Car insurance is so you don't get hit by a deadbeat who won't pay to fix your car, and is a common protection."
both true enough.
"Emissions tests are really only in California so you give yourself away as being against liberalism simply to be contrary since you have the choice to live where you will, but then you wouldn't have anything to bitch about, no?"
Thanks, I'll have to remember to let them know that the next time the state of Illinois tries to fine me for not bothering to submit to their mandatory emissions checks. Also, someone should write a letter to the New York State DMV to let then know about the typo on their website where it says "All vehicles registered in New York State must get a safety inspection and an emissions inspection every 12 months. " (http://www.nydmv.state.ny.us/vehsafe.htm). Let's see, that's two examples of you being, outright, wrong in your facts (representing, might I add, a very large portion of the population and, by extrapolation, a large portion of this country's economic opportunity with which to support yourself and your family). How much you wanna bet we can find more if we look?
This, of course, brings us to the sheer BS of your basic premise of "you have the choice to live where you will, but then you wouldn't have anything to bitch about, no?". We all live in what I like to call "the real world". Of course it's possible to move if you don't like your states laws, but in the "real world" moving is often a harsh economic/social hardship on you and your family especially if you happen to own you house outright like you just got done advocating in your previous sentence. I think it's, more than a little, condescending to try and write off his argument with that kind of, flippant, response.
"Your tax info is just wrong. You have to file one return for State (that includes your whole family), one for Federal, and possibly a local/COUNTY"
That's only true if you are either young (and don't have all the complications of a full family and investment portfolio) and/or are willing to pay much more in taxes than the system is designed to charge you. When you start to have kids, houses/condos, investments, businesses, you start to have to file multiple extra tax forms at the state and federal level to declare everything and (more commonly) to claim tax credits/deductions. Before you start going on about how no-one if forcing him/her to claim all the credits/deductions, remember that the tax rate is calculated assuming that the people eligible for those credits/deductions will claim them. Without them, a person will be subjected to much higher taxes than they are supposed to (I'm talking about people who, honestly, have a claim to them, not to people that game the system to claim credits/deductions they don't, really, deserve). US taxes are not the simple, one form per government level, system you are trying to claim they are.
"Airline security is theater to make sure people don't stop (as I have) using the
Re:Global government (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately for you. This is the EU analysis of a proposal by US to an international body, and thus all the ideas put forward are suggested by the US. So by your word; the US is trying to create a supernational government and are lobbying the EU to support the idea.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.
Re:Equal Enforcement? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just for curiosity's sake, could we ensure the following if these laws get passed?
Company A becomes convicted of copyright infringement 3 times
Company A loses permanent access to the internet
Why on earth would you want to do that? Why give corporations benefits that individuals don't get?
Remember - the three strikes makes no mention of conviction - they want you to be cut off based on accusation. The entire point is to skip the courts and due process.
Re:Global government (Score:2, Insightful)
Because of lust for power and basic greed, that's why.
Re:Means nothing. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a system just like ours, but without copyright. It's a very credible system, as it worked very well for some 10000+ years and gave us epic works of art of every form imaginable: literature (fiction and non-fiction), music, architecture, painting & drawing, live acting, to name just a few.
And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?
How many million-lines-of-code software products?
How many detailed, fact-checked, well-edited 1,000 page textbooks?
For that matter, how many good books did it produce per year, and how many people got to read them?
I've never disputed that valuable works have been or would be created without the benefit of copyright protection, but the scale matters. You can't just extrapolate from the fact that some good works were produced and some people benefited from them before copyright to the conclusion that copyright has not encouraged the creation of more or better works.
There is not a shred of evidence that copyright provides an actual incentive to create artistic works, i.e. that fewer works would be created without copyright, or that the overall quality would suffer.
Except for the millions of people employed around the world in creative industries whose rent is paid by income protected by copyright, you mean?
If you are concerned with credibility, you should stop saying that copyright helps to increase artistic output, because, as a matter of fact, it does not.
If it's a matter of fact, then I assume you can cite actual evidence of an alternative situation where artistic output was maintained at the same or higher levels of quality and quantity without copyright?
There were plenty of works created before the copyright was invented, and today we still have high quality works, artistic and otherwise (e.g. FOSS) that are being created every day.
Ah, the FOSS argument. How wonderfully Slashdot.
You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right? And that even the big name FOSS projects are not exempt from this? So much so, in fact, that even though the FOSS projects are free, most people still prefer to use commercial offerings.
At the same time, there is a bounty of evidence for the systemic abuse of the copyright by the content owners, who find the law helpful for cementing their content distribution monopolies. They do so mainly by hiding in their vaults a good century worth of artistic works, thereby robbing us of the PD and creating an artificial scarcity.
I've never disputed that there are serious flaws with the current implementation of copyright. Arguments about not extending terms to crazy 50+ year durations are all very reasonable. But if you look at what's being swapped on filesharing systems, is it very early Disney cartoons and back-catalogues for old bands, or is it the latest pop tracks and Hollywood blockbusters?
Additionally, you have to explain why a monopoly is good when it comes to producing copies of artistic works. If you agree that markets operate well (from the consumer's point of view) in presence of competition, you have to point out the fundamental difference between pizza and painting.
Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not, that producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days, and that producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.
Apparently, there is something about distributing copies of a painting that makes a monopoly good, so please tell us what it is. Explain why an artist should have a right to restrict the sale of anything but the first copy.
Because through copyright, many people
Re:Assurance contracts (Score:4, Insightful)
This idea is a common proposal in these discussions, so let me ask you a few basic questions about it.
Most obviously, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet? Are consumers expected to start pledging to random people on the off-chance that they produce a good result? There is nothing to stop someone adopting this approach today. How many artists have successfully started a career by doing so?
The copyright system lets an artist who thinks they can make a good product do so, and if the product turns out to be good it can be its own recommendation. The artist bears the risk rather than the consumer base, and the artist can reap rewards proportionate to how many people benefit from their work and how much value those people perceive the work to have. (I appreciate that in reality Big Media get in the way of this, and I have no problem with changing the copyright structure to keep the rights with the artists and other creative people where they belong, but this does not undermine the fundamental idea behind copyright.)
Re:Means nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like artists and entertainers before copyright came along
Before copyright came along, it was very expensive to make copies of works anyway. As someone else already pointed out, copyright followed only a few years after the invention of the printing press.
It's odd that people are so quick to point out the changing world when saying copyright should be abandoned, yet so slow to notice that the evidence they give for the viability of alternatives predates those same changes.
current artists and entertainers whose works are not covered by copyright?
And who are they, and how much material do they produce and of what quality, relative to artists whose works are covered by copyright?
Re:A Plea to the Rest-of-the-World (Score:3, Insightful)
That you could list significant third party and independent electoral victories in the U.S. on a postage stamp and have room to spare supports the proposition the the two party system is intractable, rather than weakens it.
Re: A 3rd Party to the Rescue? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not the two party system that is the problem it's something that both parties (and even hypothetical 3rd parties) have in common: greed.
Our politicians are almost all for sale to the highest bidder - typically rich Corporations with agendas that will usually harm Americans.
For a million dollars or more the politician becomes the full time servant of their new Corporate masters and stops serving the Citizens.
Note that this problem is insolvable since the politicians would have to approve of any solutions!
As far as support for the MAFIAA, it all depends on how much cash they have doesn't it?
Re:A Plea to the Rest-of-the-World (Score:2, Insightful)
Which once? The one who wins the primary.
How do you win a primary? Get popular from Ads
How do you pay for Ads? Bribes
Who 'wins' bribes? Those whose track record follows up on them.
Why did so many want Obama? He campaigned he'd reduce the legality of bribes
Re:Assurance contracts (Score:3, Insightful)
Until then, I remain civilly disobedient.
Do you? Civil disobedience involves publicly breaking the law and accepting the consequences. The key point there is the "accepting the consequences" part. Are you making a show of infringing copyright and accepting the full consequences of the law to make your point?
Because if you're knowingly breaking the law without that, it's not civil disobedience, it's just illegal.
Re:thousands of government bureaucrats (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure most of the population will get behind a law against life-wrecking hard drugs, but I can't see them rallying to stop piracy as hard. The negative side effects just aren't as deadly.
Re:Assurance contracts (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. That's how you'd like to see it done, but any disobedience to civil authority is civil disobedience.
The type where you leave your name is the worthless kind, because they break your fingers.
Re:Assurance contracts (Score:3, Insightful)
Most obviously, how does a new artist get started this way, when he doesn't have any fans yet? Are consumers expected to start pledging to random people on the off-chance that they produce a good result? There is nothing to stop someone adopting this approach today. How many artists have successfully started a career by doing so?
You don't start off a career that way. You start by loving your art and marketing yourself for free. Then you might want to consider doing some commission work. Only then do you start considering the kind of contract that the GP proposes here (and I have from time to time proposed for years).
I've seen artists rise through the ranks this way (only that currently, the artists use more traditional business models at the top). It happens often enough in the community in which I observe that I think it scalable to other communities of artists which are geographically scattered.
Re:thousands of government bureaucrats (Score:1, Insightful)
see, that's how it works. drugs aren't life-wrecking for most people, and addiction is a medical problem requiring treatment, not a moral problem requiring punishment. but you believe that bullshit because it's all you've ever been told. and that's the kind of thing that people are going to learn about piracy.