Copyright laws

It's a bit of a Thread Hopping, but nzm 1536's last post sums up my thought here.

edited 12th May '11 5:05:28 AM by Medinoc

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

It's called Tor, or any other of a bunch of similar services.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Tor is too slow, and it's not for P 2 P.

I think it's gonna be I 2 P, or one of its analogues. As soon as one of those anonymity systems goes viral and people jump to the darknets en masse, the copyright trolls won't be able to sue almost anybody.

edited 12th May '11 5:54:09 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

Maybe then there'll be some actual decent content on them at least...

Yeah. Once people start using them, it's an Instant-Win Condition for piracy.

The government cannot ban encrypted communications. People have a right to protect their privacy. Even if they were subpoena'd to give up their records, they wouldn't, because that would infringe on their right against self-incrimination.

The only thing that's needed is for people to start using anonymizers. Sure, it sucks to download torrents at less than a megabyte per second (fastest speeds I've got on I 2 P have been around 400-500 kBps), but moar nodes equals moar speed, and anonymity equals no lawsuit.

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

@Scriblarian To be honest I think that argument goes both ways. Piracy is as well driven by actions (or in a ton of cases) non-actions taken by media companies as well. A good example of this, would be delayed/staggered/non-existent releases around the world. We live in a global community, companies have to realize and account for this.

Napster wasn't really about "free" music. It was about marketing control. Napster took it away from them entirely. My experience was that there was a pretty big music sales boom that happened around the same time Napster first came out. The problem? It was used music.*

In the end however, media companies are making money off the idea that culture is something that people want to consume, even beyond their means. They're playing with fire, and if they get singed a bit, well that's the cost for playing I guess.

I'm not really a big "pirate" outside of fan translations and stuff. Movies? Nope. I have a bunch of ripped DV Ds on my system. (That counts in their eyes.) Music? Not really. Games? Well, I have my ROM collection. (And yes. That counts). But in the eyes of media companies I am. Why? I spend most of my money on used materials to get more bang for the buck. I like collecting it. But make no mistake. I don't think I'm any better than someone who downloads it.

And that's the thing. All too often I worry that the debate about copyright is less about rewarding the producers and more about making sure that culture is more "exclusive" to have something else to lord over other people. I don't think that's the case here, but it is something I've seen from time to time.

edited 12th May '11 7:38:32 AM by Karmakin

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

It's basically them trying to create artificial scarcity for content. It won't work without some massive legislation.

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

"artificial scarcity"... this reminds me...

FARTS

(Later in the article, it explains that FARTS is necessary to keep society functioning, but witht the usual Dawid Wong-style sarcastc implication that it's actually the other way around).

But anyways, the point is, that this porn analogy made me thinking. We are all starting from the assumption that the industy must keep functioning so we can get enough content, and this is a symbiotic situation.

But in the analogy, it doesn't matter whether or no the porn industry keeps functioning. The generic concept of pictures of titties is already post-scarcity. Even if there are some people, like industry insiders, or hardcore porn fans who would care about it, the generic public wouldn't, it's enough for them that they can type "porn" into google, and porn comes out.

In the same way, even if all of my previous expectations were wrong about the industry reorganizing itself for other revenue sources were wrong, or even my secondary predictions were wrong about the industry becoming "smaller, cheaper, indier", were wrong, and it would really mean the end to professional publishing, maybe most users wouldn't even see it as a loss, so they don't feel forced to keep paying.

Maybe it's a small minority that cares about up-to-date content coming out, and for the others, it's enough that there alredy is more content than they could ever watch, read, play, and listen to.

edited 12th May '11 8:36:16 AM by EternalSeptember

The generic concept of porn, yes—but what about deviant porn, which usually sucks ass (no pun intended)? In the same way, I'll voluntarily buy a video game that tries something different, so as to give the developers a bigger budget to make another game. I consider it equivalent to a charitable donation, and while I may just be propping up a dying economic model, I'm willing to prop it up as long as I can.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

What about the many, already existing videogames (or porn) that try different things, that already exist? In your lifetime you can't have managed to experienced all/most/some/afew of them. From a "let's try something new" perspective, it makes no difference whether it's something newly-existing, or something newly-known. Plus, if you're lucky the producers and actual developers of the old games are still alive, waiting for someone to appreciate their work because the old firms they worked broke and they were scattered among the unemployed population.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

^ There's also the matter that "there's no point in writing new stories" necessarily includes "there's no point in your writing new stories," and since I want to write new stories . . .

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

That's not the same thing at all. If you buy a copy and then give it to someone else (either temporarily by letting them borrow it, or permanently by giving it to them as a gift) then that's fine — because one copy was purchased, and one copy is being used. If you buy it, copy it, and give the copy to your friend, then that's illegal — because one copy was purchased, but two copies are being used. (This is also why it's legal to resell copyrighted works, liked used games.)

Really, I think the cries of "copyright is dooooooomed!" are silly. We've had easily recordable media for decades now. The audio cassette didn't kill music. The VCR didn't kill movies or TV. The photocopier didn't kill books. All of these were actually a concern when the technology was introduced. Yes, the internet makes this sort of thing easier, but it's a difference of degree rather than kind; I don't see any reason to believe that internet piracy will inevitably destroy copyright any more than previous technologies did.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Read any EULA lately? Most of them declare 'one copy can be installed on one computer' rule

"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - Barkey

EULA's are boilerplate agreements with variable degrees of legal enforcement.

Then can we stop masquerading them as legally enforceable?

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

That would be covered by the Sever-ability clause.

The internet definitely brought a "difference of kind".

All of these technologies in the past decades made piracy more and more easy, but in the end, you still had to go out of your way to produce an extra copy for yourself. Because, copies were actual products. You had to obtain an original copy, (or wait when it was aired), have a device specifically made for creating copies, put in empty material, and turn it on, as opposed to just going to the shop and buying a copy.

The internet brought a paradigm shift, as it entirely took out the material product from the equation.

Now, the difference between piracy and buying is the difference between clicking on two otherwise identical download links. The Internet does copying all the time, by serving it's basic function.

edited 12th May '11 10:59:40 AM by EternalSeptember

As long as that's one copy on one computer at a time, then that's still the same thing.

And so does a copy machine. The fact that you have to put paper in a copy machine but not the internet makes pirating from the internet easier than pirating from a copy machine, but it does not fundamentally change the nature of the situation.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

"does not fundamentally change the nature of the situation"

Wrong I think. It is vastly easier than before.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Yeah, but the Internet is not a copy machine, it's a multi-purpose system, that you use for writing, reading, playing, troping, trolling, working, studying, and, buying content, and all of this involves copying data only by it's mechanism.

If you want to photocopy a book, you have to intentionally set up your own miniaturized production line, while on the internet, it just falls in your lap, for being on the internet, like everyone else, and copying stuff, like everyone else.

Pirating books is less like photocopying them, and more like "the pages of recently published books falling from the sky like rain".

edited 12th May '11 11:47:39 AM by EternalSeptember

Actually, let's assume that you can copy a CD or something, and find a way to ensure that it's only technically used once at a time. Copying it is still a violation of copyright. The only reason we really have things like the right of first sale still when it comes to copyrighted works is that the public outrage would be significant. Also the fact that the library lobby is still quite powerful culturally, and politicians really don't want to cross them.

FWIW if the goal is to make sure that content producers are always rewarded for their works always then you don't allow things like lending and used sales and the like. The goal of copyright is actually to create a strong, thriving culture. It's a valid argument to say that the current copyright regime isn't doing the best job of meeting that goal.

It's why the current system is really just a sort of compromise, one that has been violated, I might add, by the backwards extension of copyright. They by and large violated the compromise first. I see no reason to really worry about people who violate them back.

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

Long version.

Short version: Some art would be impossible without copyright, like movies where one of the costs is a Real Life Learjet packed full of dynamite being detonated, or an entire castle is built and stormed by extras armed with hand-forged swords and chainmail. If you don't like that kind of art? Fine, information wants to be free, as in free from people like you, so stop consuming it, and stop harassing the people that make it.

Eric,

Here, corrected for slippery slope. If something has defined human technologies and industries across history, is always looking for another way.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

Fine then, tell me some way of gathering enough money to do something like this without copyright.

Eric,

I guess we could do a cross comparison of how much money the U.S. spends on tickets (percentile of total GDP I guess? I sucked at stats) versus Canada, where downloading is a big legal gray area to determine whether copyright has any large impact on money made.

edited 12th May '11 10:01:07 PM by thatguythere47

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?