How Litigation Only Spurred On P2P File Sharing 140
littlekorea writes "The growth in peer-to-peer file sharing surged in response to efforts by the content industry to litigate over the past decade, according to a new study by a researcher at Melbourne's Monash University. Dr Rebecca Giblin explains why 'physical world' assumptions don't apply to the online world."
Privilege of Prosecution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when does someone take it upon theirselves to demand royalties from people that trade movies by lending their discs over Sneakernet?
Shut these bums down. They don't make a living or contribute to the quality of life to others around them other than to exact fines and fees with the same precision as the Zetas and IRS.
Re:Privilege of Prosecution. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because people lending (which is different to whats going on here) over "sneakernet" doesn't equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours.
And the content industry certainly does go after those persons mass producing unlicensed copies.
Re:Privilege of Prosecution. (Score:5, Informative)
Because people lending (which is different to whats going on here) over "sneakernet" doesn't equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours.
*shrugs* it takes about 10 minutes for me to transfer an ISO to my hard drive, stripping the region coding as I do it, and then about 30 minutes to transcode that ISO into an MKV file that includes all of the soundtracks and subtitle information. If I'm not worried about the storage space, I can skip the second step. With a reasonably fast Internet connection, it *could* equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours, and the main difference between what I'm doing and downloading it off the Internet is that instead of downloading it from a host that might actually be owned by the content holder, I'm creating my own digital copy of it. That I don't then upload it to the Internet is mostly because I can't be bothered to do so, because I don't really care about that side of things. I am digitizing movies so that I don't have to devote a large amount of shelf space to their storage, not because I believe the information wants to be free.
You don't seriously think that the people doing the actual ripping/uploading (who are the people that the industry should *really* be going after) are *buying* dvd's, though, do you? All of the movies I rip, I own (physical copies and everything, just not kept in my living room), but most of the people who actually do the ripping/uploading are getting the movies from some form of sneakernet. Either they work at a video store and have physical access to the DVD before it's released, or they work in a theatre as a projectionist or something, and can rip the DVD while it's still in theatres, or they have a friend who does the above and gets the DVD for them. Most of them are not going to retail outlets and actually *buying* the DVD so that they can rip it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't see what your reply has to do with my post - the OPs point was "well, if they are against X, then why arent they equally against Y?" when X and Y differ hugely in the effort required to do the same "damage". Someone lending over sneakernet is going to have to work pretty damn hard to lend to the same number of people that one person spending 5 minutes uploading to isohunt can end up distributing to over the internet.
Thats why X is more rigorously persued than Y.
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The US postal service still remains the largest and most effective channel for the dissemination of digital video. While transferring a SINGLE work may be slow and tedious, one is not merely limited to a single work. Works can be replicated by the hundreds and what ever speed the process needs. Much like distributed methods in the ether (like BitTorrent), stuff can still quickly replicate.
They were doing this 200 years ago. Never mind now.
The proces doesn't have to be "conventional" or "instantaneous".
Peopl
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Regardless of what other advances have come about through digital communications infrastructure, by far and away the fastest method of transferring large quantities of information is still via courier.... aka the postal system or related groups like FedEx, DHL, UPS, etc.
Nothing beats the transfer speed of dumping a whole bunch of data onto a hard drive/high capacity thumb drive and then mailing that data in a physical box to some other place. I wouldn't recommend sending it by cargo container on a ship goi
Re:Privilege of Prosecution. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't want to sound picky but my local theatre doesn't use DVDs for it's digital content. It uses heavily DRM'd files supplied on a portable HDD or beamed in via satellite. The keys are sent separately as and when needed and expire in anything from a week or more. The files can be 200GB+. I'm not saying it's impossible to get a digital copy from a theatre but it's not easy.
Re:Privilege of Prosecution. (Score:5, Informative)
And individually watermarked and tamper-proofed, if it did happen they'll know exactly when and where. I've never heard of anyone actually getting a raw 4k rip from these things, if they did I'm sure it'd come to halt very soon. Besides, almost nobody can watch it - I guess the people with 30" displays could get 1440p but 4k televisions and projectors practically don't exist. With the price of 4k equipment you might as well license yourself as a cinema too, won't be that much more expensive. Size would be an issue too, I think for the last of the LotR movies it was 900GB, not sure about that. They're going out practically uncompressed, no artifacting there.
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My local cinema only has 2k projectors and I don't know whether they get 4k content or specific 2k content. Their files work out to 100GB - 150GB per hour so I'm guessing they're getting 2k.
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Irony is a pirated DVD that retains the warnings.
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Because people lending (which is different to whats going on here) over "sneakernet" doesn't equate to tens of thousands of people having their own copy in only a few hours.
And the content industry certainly does go after those persons mass producing unlicensed copies.
Who are these anti-social jerks who have the power to spread knowledge, information and culture to all intellectually starving people on earth, but choose not to wield that power to make the world a better place by sharing with their fellow humans over the Internet, but instead use the sneaky Sneakernet to share with an elite of a select few? They are obviously enemies of decent humans everywhere and should have their discs confiscated and put to better use!
Re:Privilege of Prosecution. (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhhhh - what exactly does it matter if tens of thousands get their copies in a few hours, or if it takes ten or twelve days? The end result is precisely the same - everyone who really wants a copy will get one.
Oh - you may object that "Well, SOME people won't want a copy badly enough to put the wear on their sneakers! P2P actually ENCOURAGES people to make copies." And, I would say "Bullshit!" My wife and sisters had extensive libraries before any of them had access to internet. One would rent a movie, and make two, six, or twelve copies, depending on who they thought the movie would appeal to. I'm not sure that I could load out a tractor trailer with all their stuff, but I could most certainly load two smaller local delivery trucks. Shelves and shelves, loaded with old VCR movies.
In short - the time involved makes no difference at all. If anything, the internet has saved me from further inundation by VCR, CD, and DVD recordings. Now, everything is stored on hard drive! Imagine that - entire libraries, stored on a hard drive! I love it!
Learned about P2P from RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
I learned that this existed and that you could pirate stuff from all the controversy the RIAA and MPAA have done. If they never got sue happy and had absolute no morals, I probably wouldn't even know you could do this.
Re:Learned about P2P from RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
:O Are you aware at least, that there's porn on the internet, too?
Re:Learned about P2P from RIAA (Score:5, Funny)
When celebrities start suing .xxx domain owners he'll find out...
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You'd be suprised how oblivious the average user is, to what can be found on the Internet.
Re:Learned about P2P from RIAA (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd be suprised how oblivious the average user is, to what can be found on the Internet.
About 2 years ago, I was taking a low level math class and, one day while in the library, someone from the class came up to me and asked if I could help with some of the homework he was stuck on. It became clear that his problem was he forgot how to deal with fractions, eg, he couldn't add two fractions with different denominators.
I told him he should brush up on his fraction rules. A good idea would be just to google 'fraction review' and read through a few of those, then something like 'fraction review problems' and do a bunch of practice problems. His response was: (slightly amazed) "they have that on the internet?"
Given how often I used the internet as a reference for anything and everything this legitimately boggled my mind.
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No, just no.
"Pirated" copies do not use the original producers resources nor do they diminish them in ANY way.
Economically (in respect to the original producing company), there is no difference between a person who does not buy and does not listen/watch/read/etc the media, and a person who obtains and "consumes" an unofficial copy.
Technically even stealing a copy from Wal-mart wouldn't be stealing from the original producing company as the product has already changed hands and has been paid for.
I'm not even
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Not Stealing until you leave with the intention of depriving the owner of his property.
You might take something outside to see how it looks in daylight but as long as you bring it inside again not theft. Depriving someone of a sale isn't theft it is generally called competition. Choosing to buy online at a lower price than your local store is not theft either. Choosing to buy one authors book rather than yours isn't theft.
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You do know the difference between an opinion, and a fact, right?
But this is not working. (Score:2)
The threat of litigation is not stopping everyone from downloading movies and games, the torrent sites are still running. And there are FTP sites popping up that have movies on them as well, piracy is everywhere.
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Which is great for FSM supporters and for anyone worried about the climate change.
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The threat of litigation is not stopping anyone from downloading
There, fixed it for you.
All in a bucket (Score:2, Interesting)
The article reads like an undergraduate who wants to write a shit-kicking thesis and is really oooh excited about things but has entirely failed to do anything more than throw a few disjointed ideas in a bucket. It is peppered with lines that sound good but don't stand up to a couple of seconds examination: " So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster's successors to eliminate them." I mean WHAT? Programmers coded out rules
Re:All in a bucket (Score:5, Insightful)
And at the heart of it, the article offers no causative argument that litigation spurred on file sharing. At best it observes that file sharing increased in the era after litigation but it falls down entirely in showing any causation rather than correlation.
I had never heard of Napster or P2P filesharing and had no idea that it existed until I read about Napster getting sued. I want to thank the RIAA for letting me know about this wonderful resource. I'm sure that there are many millions of people who share my similar experience.
Re:All in a bucket (Score:5, Interesting)
The other big thing about the copyright litigation process, it was all pretty obvious it was a quick dirty extortion route to law, poor people where targeted for publiclity stakes and then the lawyers got greedy. The gathering of evidence was laughable, nothing beyond the most weak of circumstantial evidence was submitted, more often than not when challenged the court cases failed.
Re:All in a bucket (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg [youtube.com] ;)
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Ultimately, they're telling Captain Picard is stealing every time he says "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot". And that's bullshit. He's the fucking captain of the Federation's flagship and he'll copy whatever the fuck he wants.
Re:All in a bucket (Score:4, Funny)
Ultimately, they're telling Captain Picard is stealing every time he says "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot". And that's bullshit. He's the fucking captain of the Federation's flagship and he'll copy whatever the fuck he wants.
And it's because of people like you that Earl Grey's children go to bed hungry every night.
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Ha ha ha.
Your statement fits the line of reasoning to a "T".
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Actually, I think that would more likely be Monsanto.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The headline and introduction of the article doesn't seem to match the final conclusion which is (my emphasis):
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Control is even easier to understand in this context. Napster and Kazaa relied on a central server to provide the service. These services had the ability to control what was being listed, or transmitted using their software. By virtue of their licensing, they had the ability to control who even used it. P2P eliminated almost all central control by way of servers,
Actually, the completely anarchist P2P networks weren't doing all that great and were extremely spammed and filled with leechers. It was centralized services around servers like DC++ hubs and BitTorrent trackers that really drove P2P adoption, it's just that the developers had nothing to do with the servers anymore. Hell I just checked and TPB is now ranked #76 on Alexia and 15 of those above are google.* so in reality more like 60th most popular website in the world. Just like TPB split from the tracker se
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It's not quites as bad and your pedantic rant makes it out to be. Consider the following.
Paragraph 1: Change "code out" to "code around" (i.e. make them pragmatically unenforceable) and you get the point that was trying to be made
Paragraph 2: Ironically, I can't tell what you're trying to say other than that the writing/reasoning is sub par and that somehow the two are equated so I'll skip this one.
Paragraph 3: Wow, how's your first year of law school going? Just kidding. Okay maybe you have a point wit
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You meant "It's not quite (no 's') as bad as (not and) your pedantic rant makes it out to be."
How's that for pedantry? :)
Just kidding before you get all red-misty. The point about making law matters because in fact the legislative *has* directly legislated in respect of file sharing and that's where this particular gun should be pointed not at the judiciary. The idea that the Supreme Court makes law is the sort of thing that gets set to high school students but has a clear answer (it doesn't) even if it
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Just as the internets route around damage, P2P programmers treated the legal structure that took down Napster and coded around it. When the legal system further invented nonsense rules, the programmers once again coded around them.
As to the article itself, it didn't create laws, it created a DOCTRINE. Inducement is not found in the copyright laws in question but was something made out of whole cloth by SCOTUS. Kinda like the Kelo decision. Or the modern interpretation of the Commerce Clause. Or almost every
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And at the heart of it, the article offers no causative argument that litigation spurred on file sharing.
I'm confused as to why you think there needs to be definitive causative evidence that the lawsuits increased file sharing. The object of the lawsuits was to reduce or eliminate file sharing. Whether they directly caused an increase is more an aside to the fact that there was a tremendous increase despite them. Thus they failed miserable in their objective while having very large other negative side effects.
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Weak content, interesting source (Score:5, Interesting)
Just finishing reading this long page on how the file sharing litigation process is flawed, I feel little enlightened. Most of the observation presented have been discussed here over a decade ago. What's interesting though, is where these observations are coming from. Maybe someone on the legal size has finally opened his eyes.
If that's good or bad for file shares and file sharing app creators is another story though.
Isn't economics requires? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't anyone take economics anymore?
Every product has a price that is based on supply and demand.
Digital media once created has a verry high supply ability. Thus it's cost is lowered. Digital content providers are charging more then what supply and demand curve intercection states. And legal controls that are trying to maintain this off balance. So... Blackmarkets are naturally formed to provide goods at their actual costs.
This is the same thing with drugs, unpasturized milk, under the counter workers...
perfect (Score:1)
Re:Isn't economics requires? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is it. The whole article is -maybe- good reading for lawmakers and prosecutors who want to have better hindsight specifically regarding P2P laws. But it doesn't get at the heart of why P2P exploded. To understand that, just look at marijuana growth and potency over the last 30 years. It's a plant, so it takes longer to "program", but the stuff available now is orders of magnitude more powerful than the "dirt weed" available in the 70s and 80s. Law enforcement went after fields, and weight, and volume, so growers made ever increasingly potent strains. Powerful strains that grow fast and explode with buds when they reach a foot tall. Now they can make the same amount of THC in a basement in a couple months that before took a field and a year. This same phenomenon exists with prostitution, porn, gambling, horse power limits on outboard motors, large volume toilets "from Canada", etc etc.
YOU CAN'T EFFECTIVELY CURB DEMAND WITH LAWS.
All you can do is alter the supply chain.
Instead of FINALLY learning this basic tenet of human civilization that has been presenting itself for literally millenia, this time we're going to blame the internet.
Wonder what we'll be blaming in 3027?
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That is partially propaganda and partially true.
If you look at drug articles for other drugs, they show a consistent of claiming this is more pure/powerful than ever before but the percentage of purity quoted is about the same going back to the 80's.
They also claim that this particular bust will put a serious dent in the drug and raise prices. But the prices have dropped consistently since the early 80's.
Think about this on pot.
If you want to get stoned (drunk), then you would need to use less of it as it
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You realize that adjusted for inflation... costing double or even triple is a drop in price.
A house in 1978 which sold for $13,000 now costs $150,000.
Bread which was 50 cents is now $5 bucks.
In 1980 the median annual income was about 17k.
in 2010 the median annual income was about 46k.
I don't know why so little zonks you. I have friends who have 2-3 joints (yes-- joints purchased pre-rolled) a day and those cost about $1 each - a fraction of booze. They are not zonked for hours and still do their jobs. I
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This is the same thing with drugs, unpasturized milk, under the counter workers...
Whilst there are similarities there are also differences. If drug prohibition were ended there w
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You're only arguing implicitly that the efforts to reduce file sharing have been ineffective. What happens when you legalize what was once a black market is that the costs of avoiding the ban disappear and are recaptured by the buyers and sellers in the form of higher margins at lower prices, which can pay for increases in quality etc. If the ban is ineffective then those costs are small.
Of course, if the ban is ineffective then maintaining it is a complete waste of resources on the enforcement side -- just
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The problem is that there is no cost to the one who isn't creating the content. So no, the black market isn't forming t provide the products at their actual costs. Black markets are forming because in this case, the replication costs are such a small component of the actual production costs. So it is almost better for one to not produce and take the risk that people may not like your product, and just sell copies of the successful products that already exist.
Re:Milk? (Score:2)
... There is demand for unpasturized milk?
Are people actively trying to get themselves sick or something? Where I live there's zero supply because it's banned from sale. (you have me doubting about our demand side of the scale though)
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OTOH, we were considering going to the unpasteurized stuff but we know someone who grew up on a dairy farm and he said that he would never drink the unpasteurized stuff. He's the kind of person whose opinion you tend to respect.
However, the government has no business banning it and, indeed, in certain segments of the population, the banning of it is likely to increase demand.
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Alternatively, the use you can attribute to piracy is the theoretical maximum demand that you can possibly have from the product. HOWEVER, since entertainment has a highly elastic demand you can't relate the level of usage represented by piracy to any product offered at any price.
Free can't be compared to non-free. It's the "infinite" part of the pricing and elastic demand. Charge the user just an extra quarter or penny and the situation is completely different mathematically.
You really can't compare infini
Information is not a physical object? No shit? (Score:1)
Anyone who actually looked at the things for himself, instead of parroting what he heard (mostly from the media Mafia), always knew that you can't treat information like a physical object.
But it should be obvious to everyone who ever copied a file. Or who knows about how "moving" a file is actually implemented with making a copy plus "deleting" the original. Where "deleting" actually means "forgetting", as in "we overwrite the pointer to its location in the storage" and sometimes as in "we overwrite the dat
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I'd buy Rebecca Giblin's book but... (Score:2)
If you go to Amazon, its listed at $115US for preorder.
It sounds like an excellent read, and I'd pay about 1/10 the price (more or less).
Dr. Giblin is there a place to buy this book at a regular price?
Weaponised Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
It makes me think about recent events with the Arab Spring's use of technology, Anonymous, and Wikileaks. Are the little people (us) in essence weaponizing the internet against the powers-that-be? Ad-hoc mesh networks might be a fall-back when the powers-that-be realize that and try to switch it off.
But especially with regard to Wikileaks. They say they've been stymied by the financial blockade of the big banks. So I wonder if there is any work being done on how to route around the financial blockade, since it seems to be the only thing that has remotely stopped the efforts of the little people against the powers-that-be.
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"So I wonder if there is any work being done on how to route around the financial blockade, since it seems to be the only thing that has remotely stopped the efforts of the little people against the powers-that-be."
That thing that Slashdot loves to hate on so much - Bitcoin. It is Bittorrent for digital money and money transmission.
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Juror #13 (Score:5, Insightful)
What do they want? (Score:4, Insightful)
It hepls to think about who wants what:
- music makers ultimately want to do music; they derive pleasure from doing that; it's their very nature to do so and to want to do it;
- listeners just dig music; it is somewhat surprising people can appreciate music without being able to compose it, but somehow it happens; they'll get angry at what interposes itself between them and what they want -- just like any child...
- music distributors couldn't care less about music -- they want profits, by any means they can get it (alas, there's a problem with vicious capitalism, but let's save it for another occasion); for them, creating scarcity is a way to boost profits; they also have this naïve idea that masses can be contained; it's a clear joining of evil intent with ignorance about how society works plus overestimation of their own power to control things.
Misunderstanding one's own power, btw, is behind several disasters we met along the way in mankind's history, but let's save this, too.
In the end, composers will resort to free music and donations, precisely as a way to get rid of distributors -- because these latter have been so obnoxious. As everyone can see in commerce, getting rid of middlemen is a nobrainer, which means distributors might consider what to do after they lose their jobs -- or, alternatively, desperately try to survive... the first measure being, of course, changing their attitude 180 degrees by:
1. being really helpful to both composers and listeners;
2. it follows, but let's say it: don't steal from both parties!
3. stopping the bullying tactics -- that's suicide;
4. having a nice agenda, being clear about it and sticking to it;
5. disappear from the news: achieve the status of being accepted and keep a low profile.
Actually, now that I think about it, this could work also for proprietary software companies and for Linux distros.
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I don't know what country you're from, but in the U.S. file sharing does not fit the legal definition of stealing. Moreover, simple not-for-profit file sharing is not a criminal act. I know, I know, the propaganda commercials say otherwise. They're lying. So, to your comment, file sharing does not make one a criminal. It merely exposes one to civil liability.
By comparison, breach of contract also exposes one to civil liability. As every first year law student knows, the law encourages breach of contract in
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> GTFO. Everyone is looking to maximize profit for their product. Everyone. Here's the bottom line: Music is created, the details don't matter. Music is for sale at a set price. If you want it, you pay that price. If you don't want it, you don't.
You may be trolling (and badly, unless it's intentional) -- but since you pose a so caricate face of a (evil) distributor, I feel better.
Anyone is entitled to an opinion, yours matches that of what I called a distributor. Mine matches one of a composer. When I do
Two things off the top of my head (Score:2)
First, what happens when you tell someone you can't do something? They go off to do it. Forbidden fruit and all that.
Second, content producers just don't want to let us buy stuff like any other normal product. Music and video come with DRM, so we can't make a backup copy (*cough*). It's not like they will provide me (outside of Disney) a replacement at a reduced price. Just give me an unencumbered disc/file. (And preferable at some type of reasonable price.)
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bryan1945, you can't murder any RIAA lawyers.
(Hey, it's worth a shot.)
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$Manchurian chip > Activate murder monkeybot
Brilliantly Written (Score:1)
Bravo!
The world is a changing place. I believe through computers society has evolved ,en mass, to a path more beneficial to the species. Fighting nature is more futile than resisting "The Borg". The founding fathers were right in the beginning to protect NEW invention to the inventor for a limited 4 year span. Further ahead were the unforeseen inevitable crash of immovable object (individual ability to compute, copy, network and communicate to the world on a level playing
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While it is bad form to append ones post. I wish to point out that the above contains a vast run on sentence. I have, as a kindness left it unfinished so as to
convey the jist and maintain the emotional content of the rant, whilst sparing the reader the longevity of the read and leaving the wonderful taste of the gist of it all on the tip of their tongue.
Napster/RIAA (Score:3)
That the RIAA made a big stink about Napster in the early days is what caused it all.
Until that happened hardly anyone in the general public knew it existed. The concept of getting 'free music' wasn't even in their minds, until then.
Way to go RIAA for creating your own nightmare. Unless that was the goal, get it on the radar, then demonize it via the media and pay for legislation in a preemptive strike. ( that backfired... )
Fixed fee.. no piracy (Score:2)
Just make everything over 6 months old available for a reasonable fixed subscription price and you will have no piracy, have simpler accounting (like when long distance calls became less expensive to give away unlimited than to track the calls).
$20 a month for all songs that have been out 6 months.
$20 a month for all books that have been out 6 months.
$20 a month for all movies that have been out 6 months.
You could probably push one of those categories up to $30 or $40.
You might miss some on the high end (ca
I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
False. File-sharing started because there was no legal alternative. If something like iTunes had existed in the early days, people (including me), would have used it. When iTunes finally did come along, it had a nasty DRM. If it had been open, more people (including me), would have used it.
Recently, I have been seeing more and more artists offering their music on their website without DRM and without a label. This makes me so happy, I usually buy their entire discography (if I like the music of course). It is trivial to offer music on a website, and I imagine artists have realized that people are much more willing to pay for something when they know their money isn't going to a record company.
As for the litigation, that is just the noisy death throes of a once powerful industry, angry about becoming obsolete. It has had zero effect on my behavior (and I read Slashdot), and certainly hasn't affected most people's reasons for file-sharing.
Price is not only defined by a product's productio (Score:3)
The price of a product is defined mostly by its perceived value, not by its production costs.
That is why diamonds are so expensive.
That is why paintings cost so much.
That is why luxury cars can only be afforded by so few people.
That is why certain areas like Beverly Hills is so expensive.
And that is why digitial products have a price far above zero.
Therefore, piracy is theft.
Re:Correlation does not equal causation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correlation does not equal causation (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the only thing observable in the world is correlation. Causation exists only in models and that model could be supported by observed correlation.
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Most people would call you fools if you suggested that the mustard present in someone's refrigerator caused them to murder someone, though. Technically, that doesn't mean you're wrong, but it's something to think about.
Re:Correlation does not equal causation (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, real funny, smartass. Turns out I had already warned that fucker about PUTTING HIS CRAP ON MY SHELF! FUCK!
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I told my bastard roommate "if you make one more damn Grey Poupon joke, so help me I'll kill you!" But did he listen? No...
Re:Correlation does not equal causation (Score:4, Funny)
No It wasn't Colonel Mustard in the kitchen it was Professor Plum in the study. Tim Curry would be so ashamed.
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However, when the mayonnaise goes bad, all bets are off!
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Correlation is observing two things and noting the likelihood of them occurring together. Causation is experimental and is what is used for reasoning. F ex thing 1 happens, then thing 2 happens which wouldn't happen by itself. There is correlation between any 2 things in the universe except when it is actually the same event, as in perfect causation: If thing 1 happens, then thing 2 or vice versa. And it still would be proving causation since it doesn't tell which came first.
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What the fuck is "F ex"? You mean "e.g.". It might be Latin, but it is the accepted way of showing examples in English.
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not only that-- the most downloaded films, tv shows, etc have the highest media sales. And what about the study done by Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, and the guy who wrote the book The Alchemist, who released their stories online for free and have seen higher sales because of it (easier to track when it is a translated version from another language).
Re:Correlation does not equal causation (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, the only thing observable in the world is correlation. Causation exists only in models and that model could be supported by observed correlation.
Uh, no. If I punch you in the nose and you start to nosebleed, nobody's going to question the causality of that. Sometimes it's hard to say because X leads to Y and Y leads to X or because there's some underlying factor Z leading to both X and Y, but there's usually some way to separate the effects. That said network effects are often very vital in understanding why an inferior solution is picked, a small edge in starting conditions can send the marketing spinning in another direction.
Re:Correlation does not equal causation (Score:5, Insightful)
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
The author is not saying anything about correlation. What the article says is that because the law shut down the conventional methods of file-sharing, it caused people to turn to producing many varieties of free file sharing software to get around the potential litigation. The ultimate result was a great increase in the ease and availability of file-sharing software. The exact opposite of what the people writing the law intended. This happened because of a variety of physical world assumptions legislators made that don't apply in the world of software.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Interestingly, there are examples where something similar happens in the real world...
Prohibition tends to fail for a similar reason...
Alcohol prohibition only increased organized crime. The "war on drugs" has done much the same, with the social problems being swept under the rug because, OMG DRUGZ!
and one of my favorites:
If you criminalize gun ownership, then only criminals will have guns. I'm not looking forward to living my life in fear of criminals - I'd rather be able to defend myself, thank you very m
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me you've made the opposite point to the one you wanted to. Maybe we should stop using the law to try to fix problems on the internet. The consequences to freedom and innovation have been raised time after time, but even on top of that, it seems apparent that the laws actually make the problem worse.
I mean look at botnets. We impose severe criminal penalties for breaking into computers. What happens? It deters all the script kiddies and the hobbyists from poking into systems in relatively innocuous ways that make apparent to the operator that they've been compromised and prompt them to clean the systems and patch the vulnerabilities. Net result: A decrease in petty crime in exchange for a stark increase in the number of vulnerable systems on the internet that are subsequently infected by stealth malware written by offshore criminal syndicates. We trade a decrease in the number of pranksters who open your CD tray remotely for an increase in identity theft, fraud and the distribution of child pornography.
It isn't at all obvious that that is an improvement over caveat emptor. There are known measures that people can take to prevent malware infection. Install patches, don't run shady binaries, etc. Script kiddies are like an inoculation -- it prompts the immune system to take defensive measures. And it may sting a bit but better that than to have the first sign of infection be $30,000 missing from your bank account.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that the legislators wrote laws based on certain assumptions that work in the physical world, but don't really apply to software. As a result of the poor assumptions, the laws they wrote made the problem worse instead of better. Clearly the solution is for the legislature to stop acting out of ignorance.
But yes, if they aren't willing to do that, doing nothing would actually be better.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, when writing end user license agreements, lawyers often limit themselves to a single paragraph to describe the rights of the user...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. It's usually this one:
You have the right to do as we tell you.
Re: (Score:1)
Users' rights are just 1 word+that word is:"Obey!" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
> [goat.cx]