US Survey Shows Piracy Common and Accepted

bs0d3 writes "A new U.S. survey sponsored by the American Assembly has revealed that piracy is both common and accepted. The surveys findings show that 46% of adults and 75% of young people have bought, copied, or downloaded some copyright infringing material. 70% of those surveyed said it's reasonable to share music files (PDF) with friends and family. Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%."

Information takes Effort.

[headkase]

In Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists [wikipedia.org] it really shows how much things were different way back in 1974 - or one year after I was born. When I was growing up - in the heyday of the Commodore 64 [wikipedia.org] - piracy wasn't even questioned one iota. Everyone did it, you pooled together $5 each from your circle of friends, bought a game, and promptly pirated it for everyone and drew a lot to see who would get the original. Back then DRM-cracking-copy-programs [wikipedia.org] were legal and the hypocrisy of the times is that they would copy everything but themselves. You had to use a different copy program to copy a copy program for your circle of friends.

Now, it's different. We're slowly being taught that information is analogous to physical property. I'm coming around to it. I no longer pirate any software at all. If it wasn't for gaming I'd be 100% free software. I have a ways to go yet before I'm fully compliant but it's coming. Free software at it's core also depends on copyright, the protections afforded to commercial software are what also enables FOSS. If you're FOSS evangelizing you automatically should be a supporter of copyright.

Music, books, software: they are all different facets of the same thing. If someone wants to give their effort away - FOSS - then that is their right and it needs to be respected. If someone want's to charge for it it is the exact same right. You don't need it that bad if you don't want to comply with the license to acquire some information - go make it yourself and release it if you want under your own terms.

Re:Citation needed

[metrometro]

Searched for 16% and found the source of mistake: support for punitively restricting a convicted person from using the Internet is at 16%. Plain old content filtering is more popular -- 60% in favor of some scenarios.

Re:Sauce for the goose

[Taco Cowboy]

I feel bad for the artists and other content creators, but I suspect they'll survive the transition better than the parasites.

Think again !

Average stage lifespan for a garden-variety artist is 3 years.

Those parasites have lived much more than that.

Re:How many are hostile to copyrights?

[siddesu]

Actually, this kind of abuse is exactly a feature of copyright. The economic reasoning is simple enough that it is covered in microeconomics introduction. The problem is similar with all regulations that create monopolistic profits.

This is money you get in excess of what you'd be making in a fully efficient, competitive market. Since this is money in excess of the cost of all factors of production (and, btw, that includes the return on your investment in R&D), you don't get extra profit by spending it on your main business. Instead, you're better off if you spend that extra lobbying for activity that extends the regulations that give you the extra profit.

The problem is made worse because this kind of behavior (called rent-seeking activity, if memory serves) is not self-correcting. Since distribution of cost and benefit is extremely uneven (small cost to many people vs. large benefits to very few large publishers in the case of copyright), there is very little in terms of political incentive for change.

Re:NOT worthless sample size

[Brett Buck]

The sample size is adequate for a 2% margin of error assuming the sample was sufficiently random.

        margin of error = sqrt(1/n) assuming that npopulation, and sample is random.

        You may have a point about the lack of randomness but the sample size is pretty good.

        Brett

Re:double-edged sword

[BrynM]

Here in California, abolishing write-ins gets proposed every couple of years [ballot-access.org] and there. Many states have some severe hoops to jump through before a candidate can be written in. Regardless, the funding in many campaigns for the two major parties ensures that the populace only really knows their names and not any information about "fringe" candidates. Even the people themselves cast allegations of "throwing away votes".

I ask: Do you know who you will write-in if your congress-critter votes to pass SOPA? Can you name who you will vote for instead to your critter when you complain/threaten?

Re:Sauce for the goose

[nattt]

Absolutely the "slap on the wrist" in Canada shows that it's cheaper to steal millions of songs and make vast amounts of profit from them, than to steal 22 songs or whatever and just listen to them. Of course, private copying is still legal in Canada, and that is done by stealing money from photographers and computer programmers and anyone who has backed up their files to a burned CD.