US Survey Shows Piracy Common and Accepted 528
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%."
Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's OK for the media lobbies to steal our public domain works from us in perpetuity, then by all means let's even the score.
Once more into the breach for Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1841 & 1842 [baen.com]:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
You'll find a commentary on the first speech with references on Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org].
And in a final bit of irony you can buy these 160 year old public-domain speeches printed in a paperback book for $21.24 from Amazon.com [amazon.com]. So there is even no need for long onerous copyright if there's profit to be made in public domain works.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's OK for the media lobbies to steal our public domain works from us in perpetuity, then by all means let's even the score.
Hell, it's okay for them to steal current works from artists and then sell the music thousands of times over for cash. Big Media did that in Canada and got a slap on the wrist for their commercial bootlegging. It's not who's in the right morally, or even legally, it's who has more money to buy lawyers and politicians.
Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:5, Insightful)
The folks on Capital Hill don't listen to the common people.
Their only master is the 1% who can pay them.
From patent trolls to perpetual copyrights to SOPA to ..... those a_holes in Capital Hills are killing American ingenuity as we know it.
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:5, Insightful)
And they just made it a law that they can come in the night and take you away for threatening to ever remove them from office
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:5, Insightful)
All the way up to the parent, you guys get it. ,A: musicians jobs far surpass industry numbers, B: filling jobs that culminate in an undesireable evil only taints the innocent who perform them. Let them stand in line for a job just like the rest of us who have to do actual work, actually do.
I'll take it to it's natural conclusion
Music is sound, it's communication. Marketing it as a tangible doesn't really work or someone gets screwed badly. In our case it it the musician that gets the worst of it. An industry exists that gets to decide WHO gets to make the best living from music. Think about it. Hand picked musicians get money poured into promotion for as long as they cooperate and stay a fad.
Now not only do the non industry musicians suffer from a non level playing field but the industry musicians get their songs taken, their ability to perform their songs for money taken, their ability to play with each other under their chosen name can even be forfeit.
It's just time to let the music industry die so musicians 'round the world can bring about competition amongst themselves on a level playing field. Music is free, forget selling it except for commercial use, the bother of trying to licence it for general use is like catching 5 lb. of mercury in a collander. Performance however is paid! Think of the fanbase that comes from freely distributed music! Taking the album purchase out of the equation greatly improves the chance your fan will have your song on his ipod. That leaves him money to come see your act, which is what you REALLY want as a musician anyway. It's the live shows that is the drug, not sales statistics.
Take the industry out of the equation and the field becomes level for any musician. You can then get out of your career what you put into it rather than the slot machine business process of dealing with the corrupt industry. The internet is truly a great playing field leveler. Now the industry can die and all those couch surfing musicians can finally get some raisin pie.
Bleating about lost jobs is kind of moot since
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up with musicians
Which is funny. You must have known some pretty shitty musicians. I know several who are not big label, but they're making a medium income living doing local concerts and getting a couple albums out with smaller labels and even on iTunes. Some have had to switch bands a few times, due to break-ups or people moving away.
Thanks to MafiAA Accounting [techdirt.com] - something that they deal with even on the lower level labels - musicians generally MAKE MORE MONEY these days by touring and doing concerts than they ever do off of their albums. Ask Great Big Sea about how they make money [annarbor.com] for instance: "“We’ve always been focused more on the live show than anything else,” he said. “Certainly, with the record industry the way it is, the live show has become so important to a band’s career. It used to be part of it, now it’s practically all of it. It’s the only way you can make money, pay the bills. ".
Live performances ARE how musicians make the money these days, and you are full of shit saying otherwise.
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:4, Insightful)
Musicians want to be paid. Music will always be sold.
Music has never been sold, ever, in history. The closest you come to selling music is selling sheet music, or selling your copyright. Before the 20th century the only form of recorded music was piano rolls.
During the 20th century you still didn't buy music, you bought records and later tapes, then CDs. You never bought the music, you bought the physical item.
Nobody used to complain about recording your LP to a cassette, or even recording your friend's LPs to cassette.
Then came the 21st century and Napster, and the recording insustry (NOT the "music industry") blew it badly. They should have sent their marketing teams to use Napster's free music to sell CDs; marketers are very good a convincing people to buy stuff. And people LIKE buying "stuff". Yes, in some cases you can charge a premium for convinience, but anything more than a couple of bucks people want something to show for their money.
And you still can't buy music. You can only rent it.
Concerts are tough to profit from and are generally used to promote record/song sales.
Bullshit. It's exactly the opposite.
No offense, but you have no clue about the music industry. I grew up with musicians, they want paid.
I've been playing guitar since I was 12, that was 47 years ago. Half my friends are musicians. I'm an amateur, but most I know [kuro5hin.org] are professionals. The non-independant, RIAA labels are the clueless ones.
Live performances are great but they are NOT profitable. It is common to lose money on them if they are not managed with precision.
There's no profit if your band sucks [kuro5hin.org] or, like you say, your manager sucks.
Of course musicians want to be paid, everybody needs money. But not every musician deserves to be paid.
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright isn't the issue. The issue is that technology limited the artist's ability to distribute work, and so the SOP became selling your own rights to your own work to a publisher in order to try and reach a larger audience, and, hopefully, make some money. In all art (music, film, lit), publishers became the gatekeepers because artists weren't able to compete on a logistic level.
Now that the Internet has, to some extent, changed that, we just need to find a model that works for everyone involved. As it stands, it's still very difficult to self-publish, or to offer your own content in such a way that you can still make money from it. Just from a writer's perspective, you can run an ad-based website (almost a television model), you can run a subscription-based website, you can ask for donations (good luck with that), you can put samples of your work up for free and offer either full-length works or entirely different works for sale on a case-by-case basis, but most of those options are pretty difficult to get off of the ground.
Contrast that with getting in bed with a publisher, who will give you money up front, royalties, and handle the marketing. You're still not going to make a mint (I know one writer who has been published frequently, can be found in most major bookstores, and has a book optioned, who is making about $35k a year), but it's not as risky.
If you get rid of copyright entirely, artists won't be able to afford to be artists. Like it or not, everybody's gotta eat. But if you develop a distribution model whereby artists can produce and maintain control of their products without having to sell their souls to a third party, you'll see more reasonable types of copyright licensing, and you'll see much more reasonable pricing.
Re:Unfortunately it's the 1% who calls the shot (Score:4, Insightful)
And the whole point of Net Neutrality is to keep those middlemen from abusing their power the way middlemen always tend to do.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:4, Insightful)
My god! A link to K5 from when it was more than just ascii art penis pictures!
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Funny)
I tried to post an ascii art penis picture here but Slashdot told me to user fewer junk characters.
How's that for irony. Go figure.
Anyways, you are rather insensitive. It's estimated that 8% of all people on their computers can't touch a keyboard without making ascii art penises for some reason. I dunno. Was making you a real big, veiny, triumphant bastard too.
Fucking Slashdot filters.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:4, Funny)
I tried to post an ascii art penis...[...]...a real big, veiny, triumphant bastard....
Don't worry, I have the situation well in hand. ;-)
funniest part about my post there (Score:3)
is that i did not look at the front page when i wrote it. i just remembered back to the sort of thing going on in the comments and story queue... eric raymond fan-fic was what popped to mind.
and so i go back there, 10 years later, looking at the front page... what is there? same damn thing. eric raymond fan fic.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years back there was an absolutely amazing music torrent called oink.me which offered unprecedented selection and quality, all assembled by dedicated contributors. Naturally, it was shut down. I, and everyone I knew, would have gladly switched to a subscription model, and it could have been a gold mine for the recording industry, because it offered quality, selection, and organization unmet anywhere else. But of course like many dying industries, they decided they were more interested in control than profit, and arrogant enough to think they could maintain that control.
Forgive me if I don't shed any tears watching them crash and burn. I feel bad for the artists and other content creators, but I suspect they'll survive the transition better than the parasites.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Informative)
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:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the artists will survive better when they aren't constantly pressed for novelty and new merchandising opportunities, hum?
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Insightful)
The author of those speeches, Thomas Macaulay, was also an author of such works as "The History of England". He stood to lose a lot if copyright were extended so much that the people refused to cooperate with such unfair terms.
The fault for the demise of copyright as a cultural imperative lies not with the pirates, but with Sonny Bono and Disney.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:4, Interesting)
This looks bad for the US economy, long term. Software (in the broad sense, including movies, music, books, and games) is what we do best, compared with the rest of the world.
Not really, what the US does best is promotion of said things, there is plenty of high quality of the stuff from other countries. (Some of it finds it's way into the US if it's translated but a lot of high quality movies/music/books never gets translated into english.)
What I can agree on is that Software is what we do best compared with other things we do.
The problem is that software only has virtual scarcity, don't expect people to be willing to pay for it and it is foolish to try to base an economy on it.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that software only has virtual scarcity, don't expect people to be willing to pay for it and it is foolish to try to base an economy on it.
Yes, the real value of software to an economy is the production that is increased or made possible by it's use, not the sale of copies of it. Productive software is capital to the user. As such, I see FOSS and commodity hardware as the expansion of capitalist opportunity to everyone, even though not everyone will choose to be productive with software, some will only consume.
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So, in essence, you've shown that people *will* care and miss Disney because they *won't* find something that well done or interesting.
People see Disney stuff not just because it's there, but becaus
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Insightful)
If you could lobby someone to pass a law that would guarantee you a fat paycheck until the rest of your life you'd do it in a heartbeat. And even if you didn't, most people would.
You can blame the players, it's only fair. But don't forget to blame the system, which is really the party responsible for this entire mess.
Until companies can no longer buy stupid laws and until legislators get a clue of what technology is, this ain't gonna get any better I'm afraid.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when are the works of other people "ours"?
Since we made laws that - in theory at least - let them sell their works without fear of anyone just making a copy and selling it themselves. In payment for this we demand such enter the public domain after $years.
Re:Sauce for the goose (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when are the works of other people "ours"?
Since at least 1787. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries is the constitutional basis of copyright and patent law in the US. Even though I wrote this [slashdot.org], I do not own it; I merely have a limited time monopoly on its publication. It is owned by anyone who can read.
Your work isn't yours, either. It belongs to your employer. A roofer doesn't own the roof he builds, you don't own the song you wrote.
The men who hold high places must be the ones to start to mold a new reality closer to the hart. The blacksmith and the artist each must know his part, to mold a new reality closer to the heart.
Every statesman and artist should listen to Rush (the band, not the right wing hypocrite junkie).
I couldn't find the reference, but I think it was Franklin (a prolific writer and inventor) who said "when I light my candle off your candle, your candle is not diminished, but we have twice the light," referring to creative works. Art, like science and technology, is built on what came before. Our art is our culture, and our culture belongs to all of us, not Sony Pictures.
double-edged sword (Score:5, Interesting)
It's too bad they're too busy downloading and sharing music to call their congressmen, threaten not to vote for them if they vote for SOPA/PIPA, and actually follow through on that threat on election day.
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In Portuguese, SOPA means "soup". PIPA means "barrel".
So, it has been fun for a Portuguese to read Slashdot lately and find Americans want to feed the whole world soup and wine by the barrel.
We're eagerly waiting you create more legislations like these:
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The number of voters who will actually vote their conscience and write someone in if necessary is infinitesimal. They have been brainwashed that that will mean their vote will be "wasted", whatever the fuck that means. Actually, those are the only votes that are emphatically *NOT* wasted.
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In some states, there is no 'write in' allowed. If they are not on the ballot, there is no way to vote for the prospective write-in.
That's where it is at in Oklahoma, at least....
They have been brainwashed that that will mean their vote will be "wasted", whatever the fuck that means. Actually, those are the only votes that are emphatically *NOT* wasted.
ARRGHH!...Hit 'Submit' instead of 'Preview"... (Score:3)
Btw, I agree with the above quote from your reply.
Where did this mindset of 'my vote has to count, even if it is for an unwanted candidate' come from?
Is it ego? (yeah, see, I was right!)
Is it 'gotta have deh Money Shot'?
I don't get the idea that your vote 'is wasted' on a third, or even a fourth candidate, unless it has to do with the Electoral College vote here in the USA.
*rhetorical question time* ...can't we come up with a better v
For ****'s sake, we put a man on the moon...we have an app for that, etc.,
Re:double-edged sword (Score:4, Interesting)
when presented with two bags of crap most just prefer to stick with the current bag of crap they have been voting for rather than try the new one.
It's not even that complicated.
You're either religious/conservative or not. If you are you vote for the religious/conservative bag of crap , if you're not you vote the other one.
Everybody else is just hippies.
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They haven't eliminated the ability to write in a candidate on the ballot yet. Not only that, but almost every non local election has a variety of third party and independent candidates to choose from if it's too hard to write a name in.
I'm sorry, but there is only one place to put the blame for the electing the shit we have representing us. The poor, dumb fuck *VOTER*.
Re:double-edged sword (Score:5, Informative)
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:double-edged sword (Score:5, Insightful)
You could add to the problem the US electoral system where each district has a single elected official. In most districts copyright is a very minor issue (in how many districts is copyright important enough to affect the income of a large part of the population in the district?) and completely irrelevant in the election.
In a complex industrialized society most issues are minor for most of the population and all these discussions that are always popping up reflect that. Democratic systems were created in a time were geography was by far the most important aspect. Today this is no longer necessarily true. I, living in Brazil, probably have more interests, perspectives and ideas in common with you, living in the other side of the world, than with my next door neighbor. Even though perhaps 5% of the population care and have the same views on copyright we will not have 5% of representatives on these issues. That's why lobbies are so effective.
I'm not proposing any solution because there is no simple solution and probably very few politicians would want to change anything but with Internet available to everyone new possibilities will arise even though I don't expect to see any change soon. The end result is that for the first time in history most of the world is under some sort of democratic regime but very few people feel represented in power.
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If one thing, I would say the number is low (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect many people won't come forward
Re:If one thing, I would say the number is low (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect many people won't come forward
Since the beginning of this debate, twenty years ago when we were all still using 1.44MB floppy disks, I have been firmly in the "thou shalt not copy" camp. I never, ever pirated software or music. Occasionally I copied MP3s from a friend, then re-bought them if I ended up listening to them more than once or twice. And I still felt guilty.
Last month was my change of heart.
I was trying to Do The Right Thing, and download Terry Pratchett's Discworld audiobooks using iTunes. Each audiobook costs $20, but I was willing to pay it. I splurged and bought the first three. The download of the third one failed, and there is no way to resume it (in order to get the rest of the audiobook, I only received the first 42 minutes), because of Audible.com's license restrictions. I'm facing an hour on the phone with iTunes tech support.
But even THAT was acceptable. Until I found out, the hard way, that my audiobooks can't be listened to on my other iOS devices. I can listen to them on the iPhone I purchased them on, but not on my iPad (same iTunes) account or my sons' iPads (same iTunes). WTF?
So I decided that Audible.com and iTunes have colluded to defraud the consumer. And I got gypped $60 before I figured it out. I therefore conclude that I am free of my moral obligation to pay them for the content they control. And suddenly, the world, and this whole piracy conversation, looks very different to me.
Re:If one thing, I would say the number is low (Score:5, Interesting)
Those of the older generation are likely somewhat short. I wonder how many of those that said "No" traded tapes or sneakernetted when they were younger and such.
I've noticed this myself. My father was a professional musician for a lot of years, and by virtue of the fact that he made his living playing music he obviously feels very strongly about music piracy. Many a night have I listened to him and his friends from the industry rail against the pirates "stealing from artists."
But, even back in the days before the internet, I remember watching movies he had taped off of television, in some cases over a decade earlier. He had countless cassette tapes he had recorded off the radio or copied from LPs and later CDs, concerts he had recorded...he even had stuff he had copied onto reel-to-reel; it was so old it predated the cassette. Pointing this out to him when he gets on his rants about piracy yields little, as he seems to think it's different somehow. The fact that, in his youth, he was the dirty pirate just doesn't compute.
It's funny to me how, to people like my father, the justification for piracy has more to do with how difficult it is to do, or the quality of the copy, and not the act of pirating in itself, like it's okay as long as the copy is shitty and making it is time consuming. It wasn't until the internet came around and people started downloading that he really started having a problem with it, which is a little ridiculous to me, and a little hypocritical as well, but seems to be a mindset shared by many of his peers.
Of course people have no problem with sharing... (Score:5, Insightful)
...music, DVDs, a cup of milk, a tool, a lawnmower, a car. People have been sharing media ever since the first record was pressed. Farmers have been sharing equipment since... the beginning of time. But you don't hear John Deere crying about it. All laws do is make a good deal of the population guilty of federal crimes. Ask Uncle Sam how well that fight against pornography worked. Or the war on drugs.
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask Uncle Sam how well that fight against pornography worked. Or the war on drugs.
Or the war on alcohol - which is the greatest example of why the government does far more harm than good when it tries to tell people what they should want. Not only do the majority ignore the laws and do it anyways, but they also create a large number of violent criminals to supply said product to the masses.
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not quite that simple. People rebel against a law of that nature when they can see no benefit from the law. Government initiatives to iodize salt have been tremendously successful at reducing the incidence of goiter. Seatbelt laws are not widely flouted.
The problem with copyright is that the perceived social benefit is not there. Similarly, laws typically work better if they're fair. Since these laws obviously don't apply to the rich, don't expect anyone else to take them seriously either.
-- Darktan
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Or the war on poverty. Biggest failure of them all.
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lending and copying aren't the same thing. If I lend I do not make a copy of said thing. Digital files are digital copies of a creative work, and because the file is duplicated, ie, a copy, it is then violating _copy_rights.
John Deere won't cry because you can't just _copy_ a tractor. It takes real work and real knowledge, time and skill to take one apart, figure all the pieces, all the compression, setup, etc., and build an exact copy.
I don't support the excessive fines and draconian attitude, and copyright holders should be limited in to how much legal intimidation they're allowed to.
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You make a good point. In fact, people didn't have the equipment nor expertise needed to make copies of records back in the day either. But I do remember the controversy in the 1980s over the dual-cassette recorder (I was a teenager then). We went to the store, bought a pack of blank cassettes, and copied each other's music. The recording artists threw a fit and they were told to stick a sock in it. EVERYONE had copies. Everyone also had some originals. The same is true today. Somehow, the artists survived (and certainly didn't go hungry) during the 80s. The same is true today. Just ask iTunes and Amazon about all the (non-DRM) music they sell.
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The recording artists threw a fit and they were told to stick a sock in it. EVERYONE had copies. Everyone also had some originals. The same is true today.
True, but back then it was a practical necessity, somebody had to have an original to copy from - generational copies sounded worse and so they would sell one copy to every clique in the network, if not to every person. Today that is only a social barrier, people only have originals because they choose to buy originals. If people decided to stop buying originals, well perfect copies would still be available on the Internet. We've seen it when prerelease games or movies leak to the Internet, from that single copy it can boom into millions faster than the blink of an eye. The courts don't have any chance to process a "war on pirates" that's much, much larger than the war on drugs and with far less public support. A few hundred thousands copyright holders can't control hundreds of millions of consumers if those consumers refuse to cooperate. The whole thing reminds me of the scene from the Gandhi movie where he tells people to make their own salt and the British arrest everyone and their mother, the prisons fill up with tens and tens of thousands of prisoners yet once millions and millions of Indians take that right for themselves, there's nothing the government can do to stop them. Copyright ends when we the people say enough is enough, and I don't mean through Congress. It ends when people stop respecting it.
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:4, Insightful)
You both make the real point, and why it leads to the perception that sharing is okay.
Copyrighted content used to be delivered by physical medium. It had separate value from that content. Those blank tapes cost money, blank CDs cost money too.
Digital came around and copies did not degrade, which meant that sharing was no longer limited to one or two "hops" before the quality was so low it was more preferable to buy a new copy.
In a way, Big Content fucked itself. It had the the last 50-60 years (ever since vinyl records were sold) to educate the public and put forth the perception that you were not buying the record as much as you were buying the right to listen to the record. Important distinction, which would have lead to a real understanding of just what copyright is, and what intellectual property is.
They did not want do to that, as that would have been logical, truthful, and fair. Anybody with a proof of purchase should have been able to walk into a store, or send a request, for a replacement copy and only paid for the cost of the medium, "printing", and shipping. Basically, a discount to get another copy back.
Maybe it was not that simple, but either way, public understanding of copyright was never very sophisticated.
Now that the content has been divested from the medium, in every sense, it's not a real surprise that the majority of people find sharing to be easy and "victim-less".
It was never possible to steal content, but now that you don't even need the physical medium, how do you retrain society to understand why it is important to pay for the works regardless of how cheap and easy it is to obtain a copy from an increasingly connected society where distribution channels are popping up as fast as new content?
At this point you don't even need blank CDs. An MP3 player and some external hard drives and all of the sudden your the fucking Library of Congress walking around with tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes nearly a million, in copyrighted content. Never mind that you could have only really afforded 1% of your library or less.
It's a serious problem. Society determines morality, not the other way around. I believe it is also referred to as the Elastic Clause in the US. Society has changed, but that does not seem to even slow down the push to destroy all of our freedoms to erect an impenetrable bulkhead to stop the erosion of profits for Big Content.
I support the idea to compensate artists, but quite frankly, it is becoming as hard to convince people of that as it is to educate them about copyrights in the first place.
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh?... You ARE buying the record, a physical object. There's no such thing as a "right to listen". It simply does not exist just as there is no a "right to breathe". Copyright does not extend to this area because - as it was originally created - it is set to regulate publishers, not end-users.
Yes, the big media would like to brainwash everyone into thinking that copyright extends to a much larger area than it actually does and that there are no exceptions for fair use (and - judging by highly rated comments here on Slashdot, where people should know better - they have not been without success) but it does not make it a fact - it just might make the way for it to become a fact, since who would complain when something is put into law that was thought to be situation all along?
Of course, the current situation leaves one wondering that what are you actually buying from, say, iTMS. You are not buying a physical object and certainly no license to any rights - it seems, you pay for a service that you can download songs from their server.
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Since you can lend a DVD (but not copy it), how about a system that let's you lend a file:
Basically, while somebody is watching the movie, you cannot access it, that is, there are a limited number of licenses available and somebody who wants to watch a movie requests a license, so someone who has it, sends it. The file itself can be downloaded by the usual means, but at any single time there are no more active licenses (movie copies being watched) as there was copies sold. However, since most people do not
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Interesting)
You can in China...
Re:Of course people have no problem with sharing.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right. The infinite, perfect reproduction of digital tools and culture is far, far better than mere lending. It's damn near magical! It is truly a quantum leap in civilisation, which makes it all the more repugnant that such a wonderful ability is locked away so that the proles can't do it. Anybody who wants that kind of restriction is essentially advocating for a modern day dark ages.
Re:BUT YOU DON"T SHARE YOUR OWN AND ONLY _________ (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair enough. But people have also been sharing seeds (as in crop seeds) for tens of thousands of years. And those reproduce indefinitely, and for practical purposes the copies are exact.
People have also been sharing songs and poems for thousands or tens of thousands of years, and employed mnemonic techniques such as rhyming, alliteration and metre to ensure the lyrics are remembered exactly. Examples: the Iliad and the Odyssey, Icelandic sagas, thousands of folk songs and old poetry.
People had also been copying written texts for a few thousand years before copyright was invented. Examples: everything written by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and all other civilizations with the ability to write before the 17th century.
Media companies lost the war (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
Whatever social value(s) the media industry was trying to impress upon us over the last 10 years have failed, and it's too late to re-educate the next generation of parents. It's only going to get worse from here, and they've spent a decade building animosity in their customers. They'll pass that animosity along to their children in terms of pirated Disney films, Dora the Explorer and whatever the next incarnation of Teletubbies are. Instead of selecting a VHS from the family video library, they'll be directed to the pirate bay or similar to find whatever obscure children's video isn't already on netflix on-demand.
The generational shift has already happened, and public favor is against the media industry. Something's gotta budge, and it isn't public opinion.
Re:Media companies lost the war (Score:5, Insightful)
One major exception: People don't mind paying their Netflix subscription fee to get better service than piracy. But selection is still a big problem.
Re:Media companies lost the war (Score:5, Interesting)
One major exception: People don't mind paying their Netflix subscription fee to get better service than piracy. But selection is still a big problem.
This is really the key, and the media companies don't seem to get it. People are willing to pay for content, if it is provided at a reasonable price and reasonably easily obtained. If they want to "defeat piracy" they need to make it easier (and cheap) to get the content legally. As a business, "cheap" money coming in is far better than nothing. Add that doing this (providing content easily and cheaply) would improve public opinion of them...
Re: (Score:3)
The streaming selection on LoveFilm was so small that I'd browsed THE WHOLE THING in un
Re: (Score:3)
It's more that the content publishers noticed that Netflix was starting to make money, and they wanted their own cut.
And also, it was a one-time rise in price of $6, which is negligible compared to what cable companies do each year. In fact, it probably prompted to drop the $2/month charge for DVD service that they never used.
Re:Media companies lost the war (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002
Eh? I guess you're too young to remember casette tapes and taping songs from the radio, or using dual tape machines to copy a buddy's tapes. It was pretty mainstream in the 1960's and 70's too. Not everything has happened in recent history, young man.
But something of value *was* lost (Score:3)
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
I think you're being a little optimistic about how recently piracy took off. The Internet has only accelerated what people were doing anyway.
In other news, major record labels now sell little more than over-produced poppy crap; high-end PC gaming today is little more than the 7th edition of a safe, high-value franchise that is only an awkward port of a console game anyway; and Hollywood movie studios are more enthusiastic about special-effect-laden blockbusters that work with 3D in cinemas and spawn a whole
Re:Media companies lost the war (Score:4, Interesting)
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002,
It's quite common to attribute the existing attitude about copyright enfringement to Napster, but in reality the attitude already existed way before Napster existed. Before Napster it was CD-burners, and before that it was copying floppies and tapes. The biggest shift was the fact that content could be copied easily and without a significant loss of quality. Napster (or rather peer 2 peer networks) were just the next logical step in an increasingly networked world.
Whatever social value(s) the media industry was trying to impress upon us over the last 10 years have failed,
The content industry has been preaching that message long before Napster, but the difference is that due to successful lobbying they've been far more successful with the legislative branch than in the era before that. The message in general has always fallen on deaf ears with the public, after all those mixtapes didn't make themselves.
I would argue that copyright infringement in most cases hasn't changed over those years in essence: people still buy music, video games and movies, and people still share. What has changed is how visible it has become thanks to the Internet. Sure, you'll have a few people who won't buy anything and simply copy everything, but it's safe to say that those type people existed way before the internet existed and did the exact same thing.
What has more significantly changed over the years is that consumption has taken on a new form. People are much more interested in digital downloads than owning a physical copy. Convenience has become more of a priority than it used to, and this is something where some parts of the content industry have learned their lesson (most notably video games). Take a look at the success of Steam, despite it being a form of DRM, Steam is wildly popular because it's extremely convenient. They rely on impulse shopping for the most part, and the customers they don't get with impulse shopping they'll get with bargain deals. Despite some people on slashdot being vehemently opposed to Steam, it's very popular and most people find this form of DRM very acceptable. (I myself am not arguing for or against DRM here, that is beside the issue of this post)
The generational shift has already happened, and public favor is against the media industry. Something's gotta budge, and it isn't public opinion.
I've noticed an exciting trend in the past year or so, and it has probably been growing for a while longer. More and more beginning artists are embracing the internet on their own, and skipping the traditional content industry all together. I've noticed that a lot of DJs have begun setting up streams to promote themselves, bands are using social media and networks to promote themselves, and a lot of people are actively making their own "TV shows". Examples of this are for instance eSports events like Starcraft 2 broadcasts (tournaments such as MLG, casters on youtube, or even in depth analysis such as Day[9]) and even fighting game tournaments (such as the teamsp00ky streams). The technological barrier of entry to do so has become so small that practically anyone with an average non-technical understanding of how internet works can setup their own platform for promoting themselves or others. Having an average of 5000 to 15000 live viewers for an amateur show in what's likely to be a very niche market is a lot.
I've also noticed that so called "netlabels" are becoming more popular (especially in Japan), where artists release their works on the web partly for free for promotion and release a few commercial tracks on sites such as beatport, etc. It's all very amateurish compared to the big established content industry, but it's certainly a powerful tool for promotion as more and more people are becoming aware of these things.
While I'm not going to argue that the traditional content industry is finished, or predict the dea
How many are hostile to copyrights? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder what percentage of people are directly hostile to the notion of copyrights? I know I am
Re:How many are hostile to copyrights? (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyrights themselves aren't the problem, copyrights that extend for decades without the creator having to extend them and without regard to the creator's interests that are the problem. The reality is that there's a bunch of content that's been abandoned by the owners that would have been public domain after 28 years previously, but now thanks to the super long automatic copyright terms isn't available to anybody.
That's not a feature of copyright, that's a feature of what happens when politicians give corporations what they want without concern for the consequences.
Re:How many are hostile to copyrights? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Read it while you can (Score:4, Funny)
How long until someone files a DMCA complaint against this report?
Great. Now we just need to get the laws changed (Score:4, Insightful)
If this is right, then we IP Abolitionists just need to go up against impossibly wealthy entrenched interests to get the legal system fixed. Easy, right?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
If this is right, then we IP Abolitionists just need to go up against impossibly wealthy entrenched interests to get the legal system fixed. Easy, right?
damned right! the sooner we get back back to the DECnet stack, the better.
(wait, you meant the other IP, didn't you?)
Re:Great. Now we just need to get the laws changed (Score:5, Insightful)
IP abolition isn't necessarily any better than what we have now, what we need is real meaningful reform to the system. Throwing it out completely is both more work and less likely to happen. Take the terms back to an automatic 28 years with extensions as long as the author cares to file them. And cap that at 56 years for corporations and that would solve a lot of the trouble with copyright right there.
Information takes Effort. (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3)
I do support FOSS and I do support copyright. I'm not sure I agree that you *have* to be both though.
I support limited terms on said copyright, much more limited than we have today, but I do support it.
As someone in the business of creating and selling novel arrangements of bits (also called software engineering), copyright is very important to my ability to make money in the commercial software world. In my spare time I use and sometimes contribute to GPL'd FOSS.
Copyright law makes the GPL work, however it
Re:Information takes Effort. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think copyright inherently is a bad thing. And I don't think most people here save for the extremists and the uneducated would support its elimination altogether. But I think a lot of people would agree that it is, in its entirety, as it exists, ridiculous. From the length of the copyright term, to the punitive damages levied for infringement, to the wide-ranging destruction its enforcement causes, it cannot possibly be considered sanity, much less conducive to a functioning society. If anything, this ridiculousness around copyright has or soon will have a negative effect on creativity and productivity, where people are now too afraid to create new works because they're afraid somebody with deeper pockets is going to take them to court over it.
Copyrights need to be brought down to levels of sanity in all aspects. For the terms, fifty years irrespective of the author's lifetime is very generous. Any more and it starts becoming ridiculous again. For infringement, the punitive damages should be equal to the retail price per copy made and provably distributed. As for enforcement, it should remain a civil matter, and be applied only to situations of direct infringement. Organized, for-profit criminal copyright infringement can be addressed by real criminal statutes, including tax evasion and racketeering.
It is important to recognize that there is a role for the protection copyright allows. It is also important to recognize when the system of copyrights no longer serve that role.
Citation needed (Score:5, Interesting)
The last sentence in the summary -- "Support for internet blocking schemes was at 16%." -- is not accurate. Check page 8 of the PDF. There is a particularly harshly worded prompt which drew only 36% support, but in every other question there was higher support for internet filtering -- in some scenarios a majority support filters.
Wishing don't make it so.
Re:Citation needed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Throw everyone in jail! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright is a bargain between the people and the creators and owners of content, in which the people grant a temporary and limited monopoly in return for the ultimate ownership of the content.
The people of the United States (and, for that matter, the rest of the world) have shifted the terms of that bargain some. It will take a while for their representatives to catch up, but they will.
Re: (Score:3)
More accurate to say that the middlemen shifted the terms and the people are reacting accordingly. The original terms of the bargain - roughly twenty years, give or take several more - were fine. What we have now is a broken contract: there is no meeting of minds, there is no equitable exchange of consideration (financial and ethical).
If creators and owners of content want to contract with me, that's fine, but they should not be able to shackle my children and my children's children with that contract. I ev
Waste in all the wrong places... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe if the RIAA and similar organizations spent more money on making music available at more reasonable prices and more easily, people wouldn't pirate as much? I looked at specifically the RIAA's public records of their yearly sales years ago...and when did they stop making money? Not when Kazaa and Limewire were around...it was about the same. They made less money when DRM started getting rampant and restricting how people could use their own CDs...it was remarkable how much they lost. Then, you have to think, where's all this cash coming from to pay for the lawyers to sue college kids who downloaded some Britney Spears song off some torrent site (as if that weren't embarrassing enough in and of itself, now the kid's in debt millions and have their life ruined). Then there's the cash for them to pay some mindless sheeple to go lobby for them. Does anyone remember how much LESS CDs cost years ago before they started throwing cash in every direction to try to stop pirating that didn't actually lose them that much to begin with? They're very likely spending more money kicking and screaming against the times changing (which, p.s. you can't prevent) than they would've lost if they just sat back and did nothing other than occasionally made some noise with scary tv commercials over how you can go to jail for the music on your iPod.
Frankly, SOPA doesn't deserve to pass if only because there probably isn't even one one old baggy senator in all of Capitol Hill that doesn't have some pirated song on his/her damn iPod. Honestly, I'm glad they did this survey. These industries should know: we don't care that you're losing money...because making millions but not millions as much as you used to when more than half this country is having trouble just finding work to feed their families doesn't make us feel a damn bit of pity for you. Settle for a damn Porche instead of a Ferrari, be happy, and shut the hell up while the rest of us just go on working our fingers to the bone just to give our kids the lives they deserve.
STOP CALLING IT PIRACY!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
PIRACY is a crime. Downloading is a civil infraction. They are NOT the same things, at all! And more than 99.9% of downloaders are NOT pirates.
When you conflate the two different concepts of infringement and piracy, you play straight into the hands of the content industry, which has been deliberately trying to confuse this issue for years.
STOP CALLING IT PIRACY, DAMNIT! It isn't. It's not the same act, it's not the same law.
Here is a true story from last Christmas (Score:3)
Amazon only sells the Kindle edition with DRM, the man searched long and hard over different bookstores and at last he found a bookstore that sold it without DRM.
Unfortunately this bookstore only sold to the USA. Our man searched again and found a proxy service in the USA to use to buy the book, he created a account, pressed "buy" and entered his credit card number.
Then the website said that his credit card was not from the right county and refused the sale.
So, after many hours of trying to buy a legal copy, our guy ended up buying a, probably illegal copy from eBay for 1/6th of the Amazon prize.
Does he feel bad about it? Yes, that the author did probably not get any money for this book, but the book, as he wanted, simply was not available.
Here is a true story from last Christmas (Score:3)
Amazon only sells the Kindle edition with DRM, the man searched long and hard over different bookstores and at last he found a bookstore that sold it without DRM. Unfortunately this bookstore only sold to the USA. Our man searched again and found a proxy service in the USA to use to buy the book, he created a account, pressed "buy" and entered his credit card number.
Then the website said that his credit card was not from the right county and refused the sale.
So, after many hours of trying to buy a legal copy, our guy ended up buying a, probably illegal copy from eBay for 1/6th of the Amazon prize.
Does he feel bad about it? Yes he does feel for the author, that he probably not get any money for this sale, but the book, as he wanted, simply was not available.
Backlash (Score:3)
You can't teach people that two wrongs don't make a right. If you can't even persuade a majority of people that it is not right to execute murderers, how do you hope to persuade them that it is not right to break a law they consider unjust?
Look at Pirates of the Carribbean: At World's End for an analogy. Everyone knows that piracy - the real kind, with boats - is pretty bad. Robbery, violence, kidnapping, and murder. Nobody cheers for robbers and murderers. So why did people root for the pirates? Because the people opposing them were portrayed as Complete Monsters. They were hanging people left and right for alleged association with pirates, murdering, extorting and stealing to get their way, and usurping democracy. The pirates were the good guys because the East India Company was evil. It was all the more beautiful as an allegory because Hollywood could never have made it on purpose.
From DMCA to SOPA, and from Andrew Tenenbaum to Jammie Thomas, the media industry has sabotaged its own image with deadly efficiency again and again. They have set themselves up as the villains of the piece. Nobody should be surprised that people consider it legitimate and morally right to illegally copy their product. They don't see it as stealing; they see it as fighting back.
Piracy is simply the symptom of supplier's greed (Score:5, Interesting)
MOST people will pay a reasonable price for something they want.
Louis CK just made a standup comedy special himself. Paid for the production of a 1 hour commercial-quality standup video (about $250,000), and put it up on the internet asking $5 to download it. It did have that $5 paygate, to prevent the casual downloading freeloader, but it is totally drm-free, and available in HD.
The response has been so overwhelming that once he paid for production, he capped his own income from the exercise at $220,000. He paid his production people a bonus of $250,000 and still has money left over, so is donating all excess to a number of charities. He's *already* given them $280,000.
An extraordinary success powered by creativity and (significantly) a lack of greed on his part. Win win win.
It's almost like we don't need the middlemen. Hm.
It's not piracy...it's infringement of copyright! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Media companies cut their own throats here (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped agreeing with you there (it is not taking away anything from anyone), but if I hadn't stopped there, I would have stopped here...
First, I don't support any models that scale with the amount of people on a planet and that at the same time have 0 reproduction costs (yes, it is 0 if I can reproduce it myself).
Second, I fail to see how copyright currently provides an incentive to artists to produce more good works when clearly they stand to profit from their works forever.
Third, copyright keeps being retroactively extended -- not just extended, but also applied to works that accepted the earlier limits fully knowing they would become public domain at some point. To me that is simply showing no respect to spirit of the this law at all and clearly shows that those that stand to benefit from these changes don't give a fuck about the public domain.
Put all of those together, and I have absolutely zero problems to ignore this notion they call "copyright" whenever I please.
Re:Media companies cut their own throats here (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright is a form of stealing.
Re:Dose of Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
I am as anti-copyright-abuse as most here, but this has to be the stupidest thing I saw in this discussion. Do you think that music/movies/games/etc products are found in the forest before they are sold? What makes you think that the cost of the product should cover the "cost of reproducing and distributing" that product and nothing else? It does cost some money to create the product
Now if the costs were set to a more reasonable level (to cover cost of initial production, reproducing and distributing plus epsilon) and if all the artists were paid a reasonable amount (instead of the current rampant cheating) and if the DRM had been throttled back (so that games/DVDs were useable once again), then maybe people would start buying. Ah, a man can dream...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Kim Jong-un has higher approval ratings than Congress. But Congress doesn't care, because the electorate doesn't have the will to punish them.
Re:NOT worthless sample size (Score:4, Informative)
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:The thing that always pisses me off the most... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, it's not being a douchebag to ignore the wishes of the author. In fact, the fair use coverage for parodies is an essential portion of free speech, which is the cornerstone of modern societies, and those protections are needed ESPECIALLY for uses of a work that go against the author's wishes. I understand that rightsholders often attack those foundations of liberty for their own gain (often having success when those exercising free speech don't have the funds to properly defend themselves), but the rightsholders are the ones being douchebags in such a situation.
Re: (Score:3)
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe seldom executed.
-Ben Franklin (yes THAT one)
Re: (Score:3)
You know what? Tom Cruise doesn't have the right to get 100 mil for prancing about in front of a fucking camera while a few 100 million people have to think about their bank balance before buying a sandwich. Take your opinion and kindly shove it up your arse.