Swiss Gov't: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal 463
wasimkadak writes "One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet, and — since last year — the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published, and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
How neutral (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
"If I don't survive this, tell my wife hello".
Sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Related : http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,800850,00.html
Re:Sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't expect it to last.
No doubt the US will try and strongarm this down sometime soon.
Meanwhile, does anyone else have the urge to move to Switzerland?
Re:Sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of our bosses don't pay us for our code. They pay us to code, and when they stop paying us, we stop coding.
Re:Sanity (Score:5, Interesting)
I was just thinking about this today. How fucking great would it be to have royalties coming in on all the COBOL Y2K fixes I made for the next hundred years, or if I shouldn't survive that long, to have them go to my family.
Re:Sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to pay an artist for his work. Maybe they could print an email address I could Paypal some money to?
But in general I cannot. I instead have to pay a store for my copy. There is absolutely no way for me to know if any of that money end up in the hands of the artist. Yet you somehow seem to accept that? That there are multiple layers between the customer and the artist, each "ripping off" a few dollars?
Not everybody learns about music from the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
"How is it sane to rip artists off and never pay them for their work?"
You're right, it's insane. Someone really needs to prevent the major labels and their *AA thugs from doing that.
Re: (Score:3)
Show us the missing money.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd do exactly what artists should do: perform. In the music space, your music should motivate people to pay you to perform concerts. In the programming space, your code should motivate people to pay you to perform maintenance.
Berne Convention (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting that one of the more famous copyright conventions is named after a Swiss city.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cisco Inferno (Score:2)
With all the content passing through routers, shouldn't that be Cisco Inferno?
Ignoring the rights discourages who? (Score:5, Insightful)
This has NEVER been true. This same argument has been applied to taxing those who make millions, that somehow this sort of regulation (or deregulation in this case) will discourage the creation and perpetuation due to lost revenue. Theoretically huge budget movies could be affected by long-term piracy but that's about the only area that could discourage investment due to lost revenue. To cut an album and then go tour is miniscule for an independent band, to make a funny movie or even a classic without it being an epic retelling of a Greek war or Lord of the Rings costs far less than what people think. Ideally this will shift media back towards a pay-for-play ideal where production costs will step back in line with profitability. For decades with the VCR movies have been able to recoup all losses in the box office by simply waiting it out. Music has a similar low overhead except for the mega-hits who spend ten times as much promoting it as they do recording it. The money in music though is in concerts and selling out smaller venues makes more sense than trying to fill a 30K arena every other night.
So your argument really has leg to stand on. You're playing into a false dichotomy in an effort to come across as the sensible middle. It doesn't work since the sensible argument is to do nothing about this sort of piracy and reinvent how you do business.
Re:Berne Convention (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Because it seems to me that "such works" keep on getting created despite the pretty much total disregard for the copyrights by pretty much everyone.
Besides, if you want to make a career of acting/directing/stuntmanning/CGI creating/whatever, fine; but why should I subsidize it, either through taxes or by giving up freedom of communication? If you can't succeed without forcing the entire rest of the society to bend over backwards, man up, seek other line of work, and continue making movies or music as a hobby if you like it that much. Or you could admit that you can't succeed without financial support from the rest of the society, and seek such support - it's available, both through the government and private donations.
This whole War on Access is even more pointless than the War on Drugs. This one doesn't even make for good victims to hate-campaign against.
Holy smoke (Score:5, Interesting)
A government that makes a common sense. Time to move to Swiss
Very interesting stats and observation
However, these people donâ(TM)t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary. "
My favorite part
"The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die"
Re:Holy smoke (Score:5, Informative)
A government that makes a common sense. Time to move to Swiss
"Swiss" is an adjective. "Switzerland" is the country.
Re: (Score:2)
After getting shit on by Duke Nukem 4ever, (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't condone piracy but I can understand it.
Re:After getting shit on by Duke Nukem 4ever, (Score:5, Funny)
I don't condone piracy but I can understand it.
Yeah, well... I condone quantum mechanics, but I don't understand it.
Re:After getting shit on by Duke Nukem 4ever, (Score:5, Funny)
I don't condone piracy but I can understand it.
No kidding. I pirated DNF in the first place and thanked Gearbox in my heart for making it. Figured I'd buy the Balls of Steel edition if the game was decent and make sure they got some profit. After 5 hours of game time I sent them a bill for $3125.
I demanded $25 an hour for 5 hours of game time, and $3000 for psychiatrist visits - therapy to recover from the rape of my childhood.
Haven't heard back yet....
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
How do they reach that conclusion? Every dollar I don't spend buying a song or book or movie is not necessarily a dollar I spend on some other piece of media. Those dollars go into the general fund, and get spent on food and gas and rent and utilities. If there's money left over, it goes to general entertainment, but that includes stuff like restaurants and bars and sports tickets and travel. Things that in no way support the people I didn't pay. Maybe some small percentage ends up buying some other piece of media, but it would be a very small percentage.
So now we've got one side claiming that piracy costs a quintillion dollars a year, and the other side claiming that it costs absolutely nothing. Can we please get some sane leaders to acknowledge the obvious fact: it costs the media companies something, but nowhere near what they claim? That it's bad enough that it should stay illegal, but not so bad that people's lives should be ruined over half a dozen songs? Why does everything need to be black and white?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
I only have 1 anecdote, but for sure I would not spend money on buying TV series on DVD if I didn't download some of the series first.
I have spent hundreds on TV series in the past 4 years that was only spent because I could preview the show via download.
I had never spent a dime on a DVD and didn't intend to until I started downloading.
So for some people at least, the industry don't lose one red cent of money from downloading, but instead makes money it would have never made if downloading didn't exist.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
You're missing the point, either deliberately or not by a mistake. First of all, with or without pirated content you're still going to pay for food, gas, rent and utilities, so you cannot count that money. Nor can you count the money you wouldn't use on media anyways. Secondly, they mean the money you'd use on media you're likely to spend on media anyways, with or without pirated content available. There are of course always individuals who differ from the general norm, but it does hold true for the general populace.
Well, not exactly how I interpreted it when they said that monies would still be spent on "entertainment products". If I don't buy 4 movies a month and instead pirate them and replace that expense with buying a new networked hard drive (you know, to stream all my pirated content), I would consider that an expenditure for my "entertainment products". Next month, perhaps I'll upgrade my computer video card to connect to my HDTV. Again, benefiting a specific company, not the victim of piracy. The copyright holder still ends up with squat.
This is not "missing the point", this is exactly the point. Expenses supplemented by pirated media do not always feed the industry you're hurting with piracy, but apparently someone within the Swiss Government has enough information to prove otherwise. Then again, statistics be carved up 277 different ways to prove damn near anything. While their conclusion is still rather illogical, their decision is the most sane one I've heard yet on piracy in this particular industry.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends what you mean by 'costs'.
Fundamentally the Swiss argument is correct.
Let's say you spend 10% of your disposable income on music. Now Napster comes along and you download all your music for free, depriving record company executives - I'm sorry, starving artists - that 10% of your disposable income.
Now, the key question is: what do you do with the savings?
Your piracy is only ultimately 'costing' the overall economy anything if you then reduce your working hours and take a pay cut that exactly offsets the money you would otherwise have spent on music. If instead you do the same amount of work and take the money and do something else with it - anything else - then the overall world economy has lost precisely nothing. That money winds up going to someone, somewhere. It stays in the system. It isn't magically destroyed.
There's some interesting subsidiary questions, of course. Like 'what do you spend the money on instead'? At _this_ specific point the Swiss argument is on somewhat shaky ground; I'm not sure they sufficiently proved that the money would be spent on other entertainment products. It would seem more reasonable that maybe people would spend it on _other_ discretionary spending instead. Maybe clothes, put it towards a car, drinks - it doesn't really matter. The point is that if you take the saving and spend it on something else, you're now not just 'costing' the specific music artists in question money, you're 'costing' the entire entertainment industry money.
This is the key point: this is really what the entertainment industry is worried about. And to a degree it's a legitimate worry. Making it very easy to pirate stuff probably _does_ cost the entertainment industry some amount of money, overall, compared to what they could theoretically make if it wasn't possible. It's a complex argument, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but the point of view that it does can at least be sustained.
Now, the entertainment industry is of course entirely self-serving and therefore attempts to portray this specific loss of economic activity in their sector as if it is some sort of magic overall loss to the economy. It Costs X Billion Dollars, they say - though those X Billion Dollars are not, as we've already seen, magically destroyed. They just go somewhere else. It Costs X Hundred Thousand Jobs - again, it probably doesn't. The jobs just wind up in some other sector.
However, the entertainment lobby again has a legitimate argument - to some degree, in some jurisdictions. See, you can make the argument that there is an overall cost to an even bigger entity than 'the entertainment industry' - it can be reasonably sustained that there's some degree of overall concrete negative effect on the economies of specific countries. Particularly those countries which are dominant in the entertainment industry.
Now maybe it becomes a little more clear why America is always pushing for jackbooted copyright laws: America is at the forefront of the worldwide entertainment industry. Hollywood probably represents a huge net trade surplus to the American economy: lots of people who aren't Americans spend part of their disposable income on American movies, American music and so on. Maybe if you go spend that money on clothes instead, more of it winds up in China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a computer instead, more of it winds up in...er, China. Maybe if you go spend that money on a vacation to Beijing instead...hey, okay, I kid. But you see the point. While it's almost inarguably true that piracy does not have any overall impact on the global economy, it's certainly plausible to argue that, to some degree, it hurts America and benefits just about everyone who isn't America.
That degree is probably proportionally tiny. But you can bet it's a scare card the entertainment lobby plays as hard as it can to politicians.
Re: (Score:3)
More bullshit allegories from those that seem hell-bent on defending megacorporations that exploit artists.
Artists in general are people making "luxury goods" instead of contributing to society in other ways. But Governments recognized that having some output like that was a valuable contribution to defining the culture, and so enacted laws that gave a limited monopoly to make some money on the work before it entered the public domain where it belonged. But with the rise of the entertainment industries, the
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
How do they reach that conclusion?
Maybe if you read the fucking article you wouldn't have to guess.
In summary "The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don't spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary."
They actually did surveys and have figures to back that up. But don't let facts get in the way when they go against your preconceptions.
Swiss do not criminalize their own population (Score:5, Informative)
Also they pay 'copyright tax' on every blank media, hdd and ssd sold that get redistributed to registered artists.
Highly compelling, however... (Score:4, Interesting)
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries. Lots of people don't even lock their doors in Denmark; they leave strollers with children in them outside the store while they grab a gallon of milk. I'm not saying there are no criminals and no extreme downloaders, but in general there's more respect for others' property and more belief that everyone is in things together. It's not surprising that such people still spend a great deal of money on entertainment in addition to some downloading.
In the United States, however, it's totally different. Individualism and extreme selfishness are far more common. I know tons of people who download in excess of 5 times as much as they buy, and I myself download literally 99% of what I consume.
I'm not here to say that RIAA and the MPAA are right/wrong, or that they're making/not making enough money even with downloading; those are all separate talks. What I am saying is that a study about the Netherlands (this study is based on data from the Netherlands, which the Swiss consider highly analogous to their own country) doesn't prove a damn thing about intellectual property law or the state of entertainment businesses in the US, so stop drawing stupid parallels before you start.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You are missing the point.
Let's say inflation and your salary stay consistent. For 5 years, before you discovered piracy, you always spent $200/year on entertainment. Now you discovered piracy, you increase your entertainment consumption by 5x but increase your entertainment spending to $300/year. Is piracy helping or hurting the entertainment industry?
On one hand you are not paying the full amount On the other hand, the entertainment industry would only get $200/ year from you without it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries.
Switzerland does have some socialism, but it's local, as in communal heating systems for a town. As for "general social trust", a typical Swiss railroad ticket booth has armor glass, banks go much further than that, and the country has bomb shelters for the entire population. There are hidden underground military facilities throughout the country, everyone in the military reserves has an assault rifle and a combat load of ammo at home, and they all have to requalify on the range every year. Social trust i
Re:Highly compelling, however... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Highly compelling, however... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I'm Dutch. Nowhere I've lived does anyone leave the stroller outside the store, people would consider anyone who did so careless. What I have noticed however is the total idiocy of Americans when they hear the word socialism, it's like the magic word to turn their brains inside out; if you so much as mention the word that conflicts with their very deeply held belief in their governmental system they perform the same acts of miraculous mental gymnastic that extremely religious tend to do.
People here are greedy, people are shit, individualist, selfish. You know what? They're still human. Hey imagine, we also have crime and stuff.
Please try and decipher the world without adhering to socialism as some antagonizing feature for ideas. If I go out of a job, I am fucked just as you are. I pay insurance every month to make sure I can afford a doctor and dentist. I also pirate, I pirate the shit out of things; especially popular american culture. All my money goes to artists who rise above that level of discourse. I pay my taxes happily knowing that some people benefitted from that education 'socialist' me provides so I can enjoy the fruit of their labor instead of watching something made to appeal to some total zombie.
There will always be a difference between any two countries, but please don't draw utterly stupid and uneducated conclusions from brainwashed guesswork. And thanks to socialism you can even disagree with me because I speak your language. Ace.
Re:Highly compelling, however... (Score:4, Interesting)
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries. Lots of people don't even lock their doors in Denmark; they leave strollers with children in them outside the store while they grab a gallon of milk. I'm not saying there are no criminals and no extreme downloaders, but in general there's more respect for others' property and more belief that everyone is in things together. It's not surprising that such people still spend a great deal of money on entertainment in addition to some downloading.
These countries still have the concept of society, as being a group of people, instead of everyone competing with everyone else on everything. What you call "socialism" is simply the government participating in being a good neighbour. When I've contributed to society for several decades with my work, and taxes, etc. then society can help me out a little when I fall on hard times.
Some countries have a basic distrust. In Germany, for example, the main job of the government agency in charge of handling unemployment seems to be to check for violations of the many rules that unemployed people must follow, and to cut the payments if they find any. In the scandinavian countries, the equivalent agency seems to be mostly in charge of handing out the unemployment benefits. One country assumes that everyone will cheat unless you check on them constantly, the other assumes that most people are honest and only checks if there's indications otherwise.
Funny thing is that several studies show that if you treat people with trust and honesty, the vast majority will reciprocate. And likewise if you don't.
doesn't prove a damn thing about intellectual property law or the state of entertainment businesses in the US,
No, but until there is a study on the same topic done in the US, this is the only data point you have. Simply discarding it is not any more honest or productive than blindly accepting it.
I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't get this. Why would someone pay for something they already got for free? Are people really still using the argument that piracy is "free advertising?" The article claims that game pirates play more games and music downloaders visit more concerts, but that doesn't mean piracy is contributing to that--it just means that people who are more into games and music than average are therefore more likely to be obtaining them in as many ways as they can, piracy or otherwise. If there wasn't rampant piracy, how many more games would they be purchasing or albums would they be buying?
I mean, it's not as if a system works where everyone just works for free without any compensation. It's probably just too difficult and expensive for the Swiss government to try to squash piracy, so it's easier to throw up their hands. Plus, this article is posted on TorrentFreak, so it's not exactly an objective analysis.
I just don't get the mindset that not only thinks they are entitled to something they didn't pay for but also justifies it as some kind of culture movement, or a strike against the RIAA, or whatever. I've never respected that mindset. The only mindset I respect is the one that admits the basic human desire of getting something for free, because they're at least being honest about what exactly is happening. The lengths some people go to try to establish themselves as freedom fighters, setting up a "Pirate Party" or ranting about the evils of copyright (but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!) signifies a level of denial I can't even begin to imagine suffering under.
I'm posting an anti-piracy position on Slashdot, so I know I'm opening myself up to a possible modbombing of epic proportions, as this site has become extremely pro-piracy in the last 10 years (getting Linux software for free means everything must be free, apparently), but I felt like I should risk the karma and make whatever points needed to be made.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get this. Why would someone pay for something they already got for free?
Added value. Most people are not going to download full BluRay iso from the net, but .avi's that lack extra features, extra languages, resolution, quality, etc. thus buying the movie again after having verified that it's actually worth to have will still give some things they haven't seen yet. This might of course only apply to a lesser degree to other media.
The article claims that game pirates play more games and music downloaders visit more concerts, but that doesn't mean piracy is contributing to that
That however doesn't mean that it is not contributing to that. A heavy movie watcher will get their movies through all available channels, some of them might be piracy, because there simply isn't any commercial offering that offers him what piracy does.
I just don't get the mindset that not only thinks they are entitled to something they didn't pay for
Well, most people pirate simply because they can, a lot because they don't have the money, some because they like to try before they buy, some because they want to "catch'em all", etc. In essence there are lots of reasons why people might pirate. It's not about entitlement, but simply about availability.
Also, do you have a clear conscience while forwarding through commercial breaks on a TV recording? As that's pretty much the same thing as piracy, at least morally speaking.
The lengths some people go to try to establish themselves as freedom fighters, setting up a "Pirate Party" or ranting about the evils of copyright signifies a level of denial I can't even begin to imagine suffering under.
There is no level of denial. Copyright is not something 'God given" or "law of nature", it's something that was established to benefit society. The problem today is that fighting piracy is causing far more harm then good and has absolutely no benefit to society. It also has lead to a lot of invasion into privacy and other corrupt laws.
(but don't you dare steal copyrighted GPL code!)
That's about deriving profits from other peoples work, while not following the license. Very different thing. Your average pirate isn't all that big of a fan of commercial piracy either.
Irony with that of cause is that current laws drive people into commercial piracy, as services like Rapidshare, Megaupload and whatever provide better privacy protection then Bittorrent.
Re: (Score:3)
People pay for something they can get for free, because they realize that if somebody provides real value to you, it is polite (and in the long term very useful) to provide value back. If you do not get this, then you are displaying characteristics of extreme egoism here, or you are simply unable to see the bigger picture. I would say that in a country where your mind-set is typical for the majority, the copyright industry and the content creators may indeed be doomed. Fortunately your unenlightened viewpoi
Switz media only? and us media from us uploads (Score:2, Insightful)
can still get you sued?
Score one for reality (Score:3, Informative)
Sony, Apple and all their minions can go to hell. After all in Switzerland there is still open internet radio like this http://glb-stream11.streamserver.ch/1/rsc_de/mp3_128
Whereas here in backward north america us classical music folks are mostly screwed over by either itunes, silverlight crap, or locked out flash based shit stations. Of course I can always go back to Europe and get real music from great stations like http://lyd.nrk.no/nrk_radio_klassisk_mp3_h or better still, http://amp.cesnet.cz:8000/cro-d-dur.flac
So what if I record some or the content with vlc so I can listen later...who gives a shit. I do not redistribute or profit from my action.
Sony, Apple, Microsoft and all the RIAA assholes everywhere can go fuck themselves. What you have done to classical music world wide is inexcusable and I hope you suffer the consequences of your short sighted pop centric view of the listening public and music!
Anyone else simply stop watching movies/tv? (Score:3, Insightful)
Money motivates mongers (Score:3, Insightful)
Note: Swiss pay a copying levy (Score:5, Informative)
Do note that Swiss pay a hefty copying levy [wikipedia.org]. In particular, we pay a fee on the amount of memory in smart phones, iPods, MP3 players, and the like. This fee is supposed to be compensation for the copying that goes on. Since we've paid for it, it is really only fair that we are allowed to copy.
Also note: while downloading is legal, uploading is not.
Re: (Score:3)
Someone finally gets it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what many just don't get. People don't have an unlimited amount of money. The ridicolus amounts of money that publishers claim to use due to piracy doesn't exist. Most of the time, the amount of what people spend on entertainment is constant. When they can pirate films and music for free, they will spend the remainder to go to cinemas and concerts. Of course, that changes the structure of the whole business, with new players entering and the old ones losing money, and those who can't change will try to use legislation to stay in business.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
its stealing either way
What is the "it" to which the stealing belongs?
Okay, seriously: no, it is not. Copyright infringement is not theft. "Piracy," in the sense you're using the word, is not theft. And anyone who says it is has shown that they have nothing meaningful to say on the subject.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you start punish the wrong people (eg. downloaders) your are a very very bad person that tries to make the world even worse.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're building yet another strawman, right?
Industrial espionage is not a copyright violation, in fact you can commit espionage WITHOUT copyright violations. For example, if I steal a document from your company's safe and then use it to learn your $PROPRIETARY_DESIGNS then I won't be violating copyright as no new copies of your document would be made.
Besides, your scenario does not happen in the real life because either:
1) New widgets with $BILLIONS spent on R&D require complex supply chains and development setup.
2) Replicating widgets on which $BILLIONS were spent is not easy.
3) Replicating other company's widgets is self-defeating. You won't have in-house expertise to build newer and more advanced versions.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
. . .That's called industrial espionage [wikipedia.org] and it is in fact a serious crime. In most western countries it's enough to get you a very long prison term. The apples to oranges argument is really obnoxious. Nobody is saying it's OK to tromp around stealing information from your corporation. The Swiss have agreed that media (music, pictures, movies, etc) are legal to obtain through torrent and P2P sites along with other traditional routes that are called "piracy" because ultimately Swiss citizens still pay a vast amount into these industries.
Also, it's far more realistic for people to be pirating mega-hits than little known bands. Plus if anything has been shown over the last two decades is that smaller bands make more of their money touring than cutting albums. Cutting albums are for elite acts that can sell 10 million copies. Then their tours are really a promotional arm to their album sales.
Re: (Score:2)
By the way, my company uses Websense, and blocks any URL with the string "wikileaks" in it. So yeah, If I'm named personally, so be it. If a Blackwater guy gets named, so be it. Unlike the stateside folks, Blackwater/Xe employees are being paid $300,000 a year to have bullets fired at them.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm assuming you haven't heard about https://slashdot.org [slashdot.org.]
It's a cool site where we talk about what idiots our employers are for deploying WebSense.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, what? Even if he objected to that, that doesn't mean that he would say that it was theft.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
The person to whom you're responding did not say "piracy is right" or "there is absolutely no situation in which copyright infringement can cause anyone any kind of problem". He said that it is not the same thing as theft.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you actually trying to claim, that if it takes me 5 years to produce a software product, and I charge $1,000 for use of the software product, because it will save people the expense of producing their own at a cost of 5 years of effort and $500,000 of expense, that I am participating in "rent-seeking" behavior and attempting to manipulate a market ?
Yup. Precisely. Copyright is government enforced monopoly. The behavior to create revenue via monopolies is called rent-seeking. This is basic economics. I'm sorry that these words offend. That's just how it is.
Here's the problem: the copy cat is out of the box. You're not gonna put it back in. The question is, how do you provide an incentive for people to create something that costs $1M, but can be copied exactly for less than a cent? Furthermore, how do you provide that incentive without stealing from what is already in the public domain?
That's the real debate. How do you balance the need to have people recoup their investment into something that is trivial to copy, but don't create an environment that is best compared to the tariff situation in 18th and 19th century Germany? Grandstanding about pirates is not going to help.
Re: (Score:3)
You are the one who is out of your mind. You don't get it. Complain to the universe about how easy it is to copy. It won't listen. Information is not scarce. And no petty human laws or technology can make it scarce. Moralizing to us will not change that. You deserve derision for demanding that we all conform to this view of how you think things should work, at great cost to us all, especially as you are totally unable to suggest any credible way to enforce this vision. Can't be done. Good thing to
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Are you actually trying to claim, that if it takes me 5 years to produce a software product"
I won't go into what the other poster meant but I do mean that if you are going to spend five years of your effort you'd better have *in advance* a deal to monetize it. You could, for instance, have a talk to all those people you are going to save money for so they start paying you *now*. When your product is done, they'll get it and it's all done. Of course since they can replicate it virtually for free, you won't see a dime from then on. If you want to earn more money you'll have to work for it.
That's not only what most of the people already do, but it's overall better for society since equates the cost for society to the cost of production without siphoning it more than needed. Perfect Adam Smith capitalism.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
You act as if you are entitled to make a profit.
You are not. You are entitled to try to produce a value-proposition with a customer, to negotiate a quid-pro-quo for your labor. It is up to you to come up with an effective business model given global realities, including the reality that, in Switzerland at least, the government is not going to limit the right of people to copy things. The rent-seeking involved is your demand that governments - globally - criminalize the copying of information.
There was a brief historical window in which information could be treated like a product, because of the difficulty in moving that information from one medium to the next. The medium was the actual product, and it still is. The information can not be, not anymore. You will have to adjust.
Personally? I think that the public/academic sector is best suited for creating useful software, and providing a living for artists and musicians, as well. With their output then being released into the public domain.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
All of those are naturally scarce resources. The scarcity created by copyright is artificial, and the ultimate goal of said scarcity is to benefit society. It might be worth considering how the printing press changed things. Before the advent of the printing press, making a copy required close to the same amount of labor as the creation of the original, and we had no copyright. The change the printing press brought about was not that it took more labor to author original works, but rather, that existing works could be copied with less labor. That someone else didn't have to do so much work didn't give the author the copyright, as such a statement makes no sense whatsoever. Rather, the change was thinking that by controlling the lower costs the printing press brought, the King and Church could proliferate pro-establishment works while squelching dissent, err, I mean, learning could be advanced.
Also, you haven't really quantified the matter of 'do not have the protections of copyright'. At what point do you feel that this happens? Anything shorter than eternity would be inferior to naturally scarce property. Or is it fine for the period to be brief, so long as such a period exists. How about two seconds for copyright? That's technically protection, but it is so little protection that it's not worth filing the paperwork.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Authors can't focus all their attention on their writing projects if they have to commit time towards making an income from other jobs just to insure they can afford a living quarters, food, computers, and an Internet connection to to distribute their work. Musicians incur the same expenses as well as things like studio time, instruments, sound engineers, and other support personnel needed to produce their work.
Boo fucking hoo. The people that love to do that shit will do it no matter what, you can't keep them from it. And the people that do it because they are makin a buck, typically speaking are not really the ones anyone wants to hear from anyways so... yeah... waaa....
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when copyright expired in a reasonable period of time this might have been a reasonable argument - even though the fraction of benefit that fell on actual artists was less than one percent. Now it's not even that, and copyright is forever.
The social contract of copyright is to grant the artist a monopoly !for a limited and reasonable time! to encourage the art by making it more profitable. But art is art, and culture is the sum of our art. All art must enter the public domain if we are to advance as a culture. Art is what defines our culture. So the monopoly should be limited and brief, not endless and without scope.
So now some people break the law when they'd rather not. It's the law, not them, that's wrong. By assimilating illicitly this forbidden art they are advancing culture, which is a higher calling.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Art was created by creative individuals long before we even had the reasonable copyright laws of old. Now that we have laws that only serve the entertainment industry middle-men, it is even less relevant. And is really the art of the 10% or so practitioners who get to make a living off it better than that of the hobbyists?
I see you, too, trot the old "think of the artists" argument, but given what meager fraction of a work's price the artist in general gets from a sale, most of them might as well have stayed amateur and held a well-paying ordinary job and made more money that way.
Unless you somehow can come up with an argument for why the salary of some director in Vivendi Universal has any effect on the quality of an artistic creation.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
But I suspect in this case he/she will be happy if you keep repeating those two lines (unchanged and in context) to the whole world, even if they are unattributed.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stealing is the act of taking someone else's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of that property. This is not stealing in any way. There is no intention to permanently deprive anyone of anything.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
When NancyBoy the pirate enters the picture, and receives the benefit of ABCD without paying for it, he just stole $1, collectively, from the 10 people who paid to receive benefit.
No he did not.
If person A has $100 and pays $1 for the software, he now has $99. This is totally independent on the number of copies sold or copied without a license.
You seem to think there is some rule that the price of a product to the end consumer is costs divided by the number sold. But for an infinitely copyable product, any copy sold after that break-even point is called "profit". There is no "payback" to the people who purchased the earlier copies of it: If NancyBoy the pirate paid for his copy, no c
Re: (Score:3)
There are 3 basic classes of consumers, not 2.
1. Those who pay for software, and use it.
2. Those who pirate software, but would pay for it if they couldn't pirate it.
3. Those who pirate software, but would not otherwise pay for it.
#3 seems to be what the Swiss decision is based on.
I agree to an extent, but that that list is not exhaustive. I can think of a few more off the top of my head:
4. Those who pirate the software and pay for it, but would not otherwise have paid for it
5. Those who pirate the software and pay for it, but would have paid for it anyway
6a. Those who pay for software but don't use it except to make and sell illegal copies
6b. Those who make and sell illegal copies without having paid
6c. Customers of #6a and #6b (special cases of #2 and #3, some of whom believe to be
Re:Digital Product (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, let's thrash out the realm of Digital Products a bit more.
I also agree that the *costs* don't change, it's the *revenue* side that's the problem.
Producing digital products, including both music&movies and software, sinks all 100% of the costs up front. Then the producer is stuck trying to recover those costs. Previously, every issued copy was a sale, let's say 10% slippage from favors to friends, etc. So rephrasing the line above, "a digital product comes closer to breaking even and then making a profit the more people use it."
Now we get to you and your 200. Your mistake above was that we start with you at the beginning of your purchase cycle. You know about my game, you have 200 to spend... and you decide that my game is not worth spending it on to you. However, you still want to play it. (Since it's the "zero" that does strange things to lots of equation, let's say it's "worth a penny" that you dig up off the floor of your car.) You're now essentially walking up to me with the following theoretical conversation:
"Hi. I want to play your game. How much?"
"Hi. My price is $20."
"Hmm. Nah, I don't want to pay that."
"Okay. Have a nice day."
"No, I'm going to play it anyway. I copied my friend's CD."
"So when do I get my $20?"
"I dunno, I don't care. I'll tell a couple buddies, maybe they will buy a copy. I'm going to go play now, bye."
I'm pretty sure every downloader doesn't really think they have fully satisfied the requirements for their digital item. It's a gut level reaction to these upfront cost vs duplication cost changing equations. Admit it, there's a bit of "rebellious excitement" going on. Paying is "boring". Harnessing technology to copy it for free is "fun". So since we're still in thought experiment land, I'll send Security over to you and demand that you either pay me my $20 or delete "your" copy of the game.
Accounting and Game Theory have half solved this puzzle 40 years ago. It's a deliberate psychological refusal to allocate the Sunk Costs to make the digital item. You made your copy, so you purposely stop caring where my revenue comes from. It's not your right to make me "hope that if enough people copy the game to make it go viral, someone eventually will actually pay the real price for it". That *is* the modern emerging strategy, but you shouldn't be forcing me to delay my revenue at your whim.
This is the rough internal dialogue occurring in the minds of each and every downloader. "I've ripped my copy, I'm done. Your rent is not my problem". The last missing part is for you to provide me with something of *guaranteed* equal value to my purchase price, like a signature on a petition backed by someone who says "for every signature on this petition I'll grant the producer his purchase price in your name as a creative subsidy". By not providing that alternate value, THAT is the unstated implicit lost value caused by digital copying.
This is essentially the last word on the copyright dilemma at this time. It will occur with every digital item, times every downloader, forever until we get Non-Purchase methods of giving value back to the producers.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
The economics of theft and copyright infringement are completely different. If your argument has any merit at all, it can stand on it's own instead of free riding on the economic arguments of theft. People who call copyright infringement theft are either idiots or relying upon an appeal to emotion.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Funny)
People who call copyright infringement theft are either idiots or relying upon an appeal to emotion.
Hey, now, that is unfair. A significant portion of them are both.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software
No, you aren't. They already used that time, and of their own volition. The pirate had nothing to do with that.
and their right to get paid for producing the software.
How does that work? They still very much have that right. You haven't taken it from them. Someone else can still buy the software.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done.
Except, in that case, you've asked them to paint your house (asked them to do a job), and then not paid them. You've actually hurt (depending on how you define "hurt") them by directly wasting their time. Pirates are not people who ask artists to do jobs and then don't pay them. The artist takes the job of their own volition and the pirate has nothing to do with that (they're just potential customers).
Re: (Score:3)
When you hire a painter, there's a contract. Copyright holders had a contract with ALL OF US. When one of us violates that contract it is indeed very much like not paying the painter.
Now notice that I used had. The past tense. That's because up until the late 90s I was fimly on the side of the content creators. Then Eldrid vs. Ashcroft and a number of other things convinced me that the contract was defective. It's part of the larger problem of corporate usurpation of our government in the US. Thus, t
Re: (Score:3)
When you hire a painter, there's a contract. Copyright holders had a contract with ALL OF US. When one of us violates that contract it is indeed very much like not paying the painter.
The thing that I think is wrong with this analogy is that in one situation, someone is being asked by a party to complete a job and then not getting paid, and then in the other situation, no such thing is happening. They start the job and complete it without any interaction with the pirate.
All of us? Irrelevant. The pirate didn't give them any job.
Re: (Score:2)
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time.
The difference is that you never promised anyone you would pay for the work.
You can try to extend that to the social contract, but then the analogy breaks down immediately because in the case of the painter, without your specific, individual promise to pay the work would not be done, but in the case of the author the work will be done whether any specific individual buys a copy or not. More to the point, society in general is upholding the social contract because people are still spending their entire enter
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Officially, the Swiss government has decided that they have no more right to get paid for each copy of that software than I have to get paid for your reading my post. Finally, the legal understanding has caught up with material reality: you can no longer treat strings of numbers (which is what a digital file is) as "things" in the physical sense. Technology briefly created a period where you could treat music as a "thing," technology has ended that period.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
A software developer is spending time, of her own volition, on the speculation that the time spent will be rewarded with purchases. This expectation driving her speculation comes from a very old social contract: copyright. An "agreement" between information producers and information users, brokered by governments, copyright offered content producers a limited period of exclusive copying so that they might profit from their work (not to guarantee it... quality and market would still matter), and to encourage content producers to make that speculation to promote "the useful arts and sciences" in our society. In exchange, the work would enter the public domain at the end of that limited period, benefiting all.
The social contract has been violated. Industrial alliances of gigantic corporate content copyright aggregators purchased laws from various governments, firstly, to extend the limited term, further and further, retroactively, until the point that to most living humans, the period of copyright is "permanent." Secondly, with the rise of better and better digital technologies, and the increased ease and lowered expense of information copying and distribution, the industrial alliances invented DRM to directly violate and damage the easily copied nature of information. The same alliances then purchased legislation against thwarting DRM, etc... Information restricted by DRM is information that cannot enter the public domain and become freely copyable, unless some non-DRM copy was stored in escrow or some such arrangement. Those who have violated the copyright social convention haven't even considered such an action, as their intention with regards to eroding the concept of "limited term" has become their way of life: hence the invention of the term "Intellectual Property."
The agreement a homeowner makes with a painter to paint the house is direct, simple, and real. House painters never purchased laws stating that they could, once hired at an hourly rate, paint half of the remaining job, each day, in perpetuity, and be paid for it. The "agreement" involved in the concept of copyright has been broken for a long time, by the content industries, and most people on the other end of that brokered-before-they-were-born "agreement" no longer support it and many rightly no longer honor it. Intelligent information producers have already started looking at other revenue models and incorporate the above facts in their speculative calculations before spending time on a work. So who gets "deprived" of something to which they have a "right?" The people are deprived of the public domain works they were due prior to every retroactive limit extension.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting concept... again, a brokered "deal" where a sitting government officer of some sort removes land from the public domain and sells it to a private entity... but "the people" are compensated with the cash exchanged for that land. Most government brokered "deals" are far shadier than that, but let's imagine that the money went into some other public domain investment. So there was an equitable trade: the people lost the public use of that land parcel and got a new bridge somewhere instead, for example. And the deal is done at that time. This is an actual exchange, honored by both parties... it's respectable. It's not at all like what has happened to copyright.
And of course, we're talking land, physical space, subject to scarcity, which is the opposite of information, infinitely copyable. Oddly enough, exclusive use rights of land are quite often overturned in the interest of the public... not just eminent domain either. There's various "squatters rights" laws that allow for a parcel to change ownership if it has been occupied by a new entity for enough years without being noticed and evicted by the previous owner. To continue making analogies and pursue your question, shouldn't every work that falls out of publication for some set duration enter the public domain for preservation of our culture? The law recognizes that land parcels shouldn't just sit, deteriorating, used by no one, due to a forgotten ownership claim, etc... So even with the widely disputed "information is property" concept in play, there's plenty of precedent for the public good to be considered.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I cannot speak for everybody, but at least with me your statement is more than true.
I listen to a wide variety of music, but metal and its extreme forms are my favorite genre overall. And most of the bands I love I would never had heard about if it wasn't for piracy. Bands like that aren't much played on the radio and I as a stundent can't really afford to buy unkown albums to sample them out.
So, what I do is I pirate much of the works of larger bands that I know are doing well and I support them by paying
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still getting something for nothing, and maybe you spend the same amount in entertainment, but its distributed totally differently. If you spend $100 on some blockbuster concert and then pirate 10 albums from smaller bands, the only one winning is the big act. Rationalize it any way you want, but its stealing either way.
First of all, no. It's not stealing. Stealing is the incorrect term. Nothing is being taken, information is being copied. If you want want to use a term, the one your looking for is copyright infringement.
Second, it's not copyright infringement because you can only break the law when the law says something is wrong. The government has come out to say a particular activity is not against the law.
Third, finally a body recognizes that money is not infinite. If you only have $100.00 to spend and you plan on spending it, there is no more money to be spent. If you choose to spend it all on a concert then so be it. There is no money left to buy any of those albums if you wanted to or not. You valued that concert more than those albums so that's where your money went. If other people value the concert the same way then it will be successful and make tons of money. Not everyone will think the same way. Some will value those albums more than some stupid concert and will buy albums. If they are good they more people will buy them. If they are crap then no one will buy them. If they are great then maybe I'll go to one of their concerts.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not just go out and buy the content? Just print up money on your computer. You wouldn't be stealing anything or depriving anyone of anything.
Re: (Score:3)
If 33% of the population are doing it then why would the government that represents those people want to make it illegal? It is a democratic country, one that ours could learn a lot from. This is not stealing in any way so why would the government want to get involved. Why does the US government get involved? because they are much more corrupt and easily bought. This should have remained civil action and the fact that a country sees it that way should not even be news.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I have wanted to move my servers for quite a while. No one is going to ask to look at your logs... You can proxy through there and enjoy their sane legal system...
Re:Downloading, not uploading: Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a Swiss citizen and I can confirm that while downloading is legal, uploading is technically illegal. On the other hand, mass-discovery methods to detect uploaders ARE illegal here as well, and there are no political intentions to criminalize copyright laws. Switzerland is a direct democracy, meaning that any new law that is passed may be challenged by the people by collecting at least 100K signatures (that's about 1.5% of the population) against it.
About two years ago, one of the three judges of our Supreme Court made it clear in an interview that he was personally against going after people for "personal copyright infringement", stating that when the majority of the people is found to be infringing some law, that law was likely to be biased against the general interest.
Re: (Score:3)
Copyright protection exists as a fiat of Government. Here, the same Government that graciously give the artist his copyright has decided to clarify one aspect of it. If the artists cannot accept that that is the Government's prerogative maybe they should find another job?
The creator can perhaps feel like he is Lando Calrissian and the Government is Darth Vader, though: "I have amended the copyright. Pray I do not amend it further".