Copyright and the Concept of Ownership in the Information Age

And yet forcing people to give you their work isn't robbery?

Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything. You don't have to release a work.

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

Somebody has acquired a copy of some data. That somebody seeds that data so I can get it.

The artist doesn't lose a dime: If he had ten thousand bucks on the bank account before I pirate her latest album, she's still got ten thousand bucks, and none of her property has been harmed.

It would only be a lost sale had I been willing to pay for that content at all if I couldn't pirate it (and you always can), which is a far-fetched assumption: I don't pay for content. At all. Ever. Our hypothetical rock star didn't lose a dime through my piracy. She didn't earn some money that she wasn't going to earn anyway.

edited 20th Jul '11 1:27:35 PM by SavageHeathen

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

Oh goody, Savage is here with his infinitely predictable response.

Why is it okay for people to steal something someone else made, again? Why should artists be forced to struggle even if (potentially) their work is being read by millions?

What do you think will happen to the level of creation if virtually no artists are successful? No one could possibly believe the "starving artist" stereotype is desirable or even currently all that widespread, and don't all those who fit that designation labor on in hopes of some future prosperity?

When I make something, anything, I should be able to sell it, and not have to endure someone outright stealing it. Saying "it's going to happen anyways," or, "but preventing that theft necessitates x y and z, which are all terrible!" is both a cop out and a lie, because you have no functional crystal ball and there's always another way to skin a cat.

Greedy people on both sides are far too willing to create moral justifications for the most extreme, damaging visions of the future, futures which coincidentally align with their own pocketbooks! I'm sure it's just a coincidence, however.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

You're talking about distribution of information. The last 50 years of electronics research has been dedicated to doing exactly what you are saying shouldn't happen, and that research is continuing at a frightening pace. You aren't even talking about drinking the ocean; you're talking about drinking Grey Goo.

Once something has been released to the public domain, it cannot be protected. Any business model that relies on its protection will fail. Morality is irrelevant.

edited 20th Jul '11 1:32:27 PM by Yej

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

I wouldn't say it's entirely for profit. It should be to protect the integrity of the user's work and the user's ownership of it. I understand if someone wouldn't want the work to be recklessly hacked and slashed.

But those standards should be loosened in the Internet age.

Now using Trivialis handle.

Great, now I can't release my work, that's ALSO imposing on my freedom.

Thanks so much. Either you can respect an artist's wishes, and yes, they can choose to give away their work free and clear if they wish, or you don't. You have chosen the latter option.

Don't give me a story about you being free, you have chosen a course that will impose on others while protesting that it's not.

Anyway, the tools to defeat anything the copyright trolls bring are already there and working flawlessly.

It only takes the government to try to crack down, and the whole copyright monstrosity becomes 100% and permanently meaningless, unless a ban on people encrypting their communications gets approved (and it can't).

We've got the tech to protect the free sharing of all information. The tools to defeat surveillance either we already got or we'll get.

The copyright faction, in practice, has already lost.

edited 20th Jul '11 1:39:58 PM by SavageHeathen

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

LOL, Free sharing of information, that's not what it is about. It's about free-loading.

And here's why encryption won't work...because people want to watch the stuff, so it has to be decrypted, and that means people will do it, and since they all want to "share" then they'll be reaching out to others, and some of them will be moles.

Even if it were that big a problem to deal with, what's more likely to happen is the content creators find a better way to get funding. Want a new series to be produced? You'll have to put up the money for it. If we're lucky, it'll be a bond system, not a pre-pay and pray approach.

edited 20th Jul '11 1:45:35 PM by blueharp

The purpose of copyright is not to "protect the right of the creator to profit from the creator's work".

The purpose of copyright is to allow creators to profit from their work, so that people can devote significant time and money to creating such works.

Why do we do this? Because as a society, we have decided that we rather like having a culture.

Though I think the current regime is counterproductive for that end. Now that the vast majority of works relevant to the modern culture are privately owned, there are economic roadblocks to adapting/retelling/weaving-folklore-in-general-out-of the modern culture, robbing it of historical weight.

edited 20th Jul '11 1:45:12 PM by Tangent128

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

Your optimism is so vewy cute, Savage, but it also doesn't take into account the dark side of present technology. Imagine PCs being replaced with dumb terminals, mere windows to code and data being run on centralized mainframes through a stream of static A/V I/O. Access to absolutely everything rented, the capability to install software or create content restricted by unbreakable licenses, and real PCs relegated to the ghetto of the “legacy” internet, incapable of any threatening (i.e.: practical) use.

The big boys can play hardball too, and they're much more experienced.

Before copyright, there was no way for creators to fund efforts too big to get paid for in live performances, which limited what they could do.

Not just their right to profit, but their right not to lose money on something popular. Some types of work are capital-intensive.

^ I think the problem isn't that so much of our culture is privately owned, but that it's owned by someone other than its creators. Just look at the puddle of derivative mediocrity that is internet culture for where no ownership can go.

Eric,

edited 20th Jul '11 1:55:47 PM by EricDVH

Besides, it doesn't have to be impossible to copy something. It just has to be sufficiently difficult that the average person wouldn't bother.

Why is anyone under any obligation to make said copying easier? Especially since, no matter what you say, said copying is hurting their chances for profit.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

Copyright has proven itself able to make production of quality works feasible, yes. But without negotiations, these works can't draw on anything not made by their creator or people who died a century ago.

"Derivative mediocrity" isn't what I'd wish all works to be, but it is a large part of what cements a work into the culture. But with shorter copyrights (say a decadeish), professional creators can freely draw on content that, while slightly dated, is at least still relevant to the audience.

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

As long as filesharing remains nigh-trivial, it has to be sufficiently difficult for one person to crack it.

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

Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way around—if we can't get people to buy fiction, what can we do to still turn a profit off of it?

(I dread the fact that the answer is probably "Product Placement.")

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

Now you know why they're going after the centralized exchange sites.

- See

I meant difficult to find the cracked copies. I'm well aware of how easy it is to wait for someone else to crack things.

edited 20th Jul '11 2:58:45 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I can't say what is and isn't right, but I've been growing in the opinion that music at least, whether recordings or sheet music should be free to access without restriction so long as it's just a digital copy you're obtaining. I think that sort of mentality encourages the growth of the artform instead of hindering it, mostly because I've seen what the Touhou fandom has done in that environment.

I don't know how the musicians and artists would make money per say. But I think it's perfectly fine to charge for concerts and the like. I've also heard that back in Mozart's day the real money didn't come from concerts, but from building a name and then getting paid for teaching. That strikes me as a particularly fair and beneficial arrangement.

@Eric

I'm not entirely sure the government could hardball people into dealing with that much control, unless they were determined to break into everyone's homes and remove everything that looked even vaguely electronic. Sure, the scale might be slightly reduced, but resistance would still exist, unless literally everything was seized.

At that level of attempted control, the entire circumstance has a vaguely similar analogy in controlling violent rebellion and terrorism. Even with the US military, the attempt of officials with much more draconian search and seizure laws, and other advantages, terrorist attacks still did (and to some extent still do) take place relatively regularly in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

If governments and even large corporations have proven anything, it's that even they can't control the actions of a huge quantity of people, without trying very hard to cater to how they naturally behave. Once force comes into the equation, there's more than enough precedent that governments and corporations consistently drop the ball as far as protecting their long term interests goes.

Now if they were actually smart about it, worked from a less twitchy, reactive state, and slowly but surely changed things with some subtlety , and then worked even harder to keep anyone from remembering how shitty their lives have become, we might end up in some kind of 1984-esque nightmare. But there's very little precedent for that. Yet, anyway.

Who says they'd need force? Look around you, and you'll see the first buds and tendrils of that nightmare sprouting under your feet. Google Apps, Apple iOS, Microsoft .NET, OnLive, MMOs, the unprecedented rise of game consoles and cellphones, un-neutral internet access, cable/cellular “rich” intranet services… If people accept it without resistance, mere practicality would mean all old equipment would simply be unusable. One rather stunning example for me was when all of the major ISPs unilaterally dropped USENET access on the specious basis that it was a “den of child pornography.”

Seeing rap and euroclub, I've reached exactly the opposite conclusion.

Eric,

I think the main problem with copyright isn't so much the idea of copyright itself. It's MASSIVE overvaluing of content in the eyes of the companies producing it, abusive treatment of legitimate consumers and extremely overzealous attempts at enforcing it.

As long as it's cheap and convenient people don't mind paying for stuff. iTunes, Netflix, Steam etc have proven that. People love them, people use them a lot and people happily pay for the content on them.

Yet when a game publisher puts something like Secu ROM in it's games or unskippable ads are placed at the start of DVD's people get seriously pissed off and start pirating instead. Many large media companies have completely forgotten how to treat their customers well and piracy is the backlash against it.

Once they stop clinging to outdated business models and hugely overinflated content valuations they'll find that piracy suddenly becomes much less of a problem.

Teenagers and people who don't have a job or a credit card will probably keep pirating everything, but everyone else doesn't mind paying if it's both cheap and convenient. When it's not, they pirate instead.

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

Disturbing as it is for me to say this, but, Savage just summed it up perfectly.

edited 22nd Jul '11 2:55:03 PM by Capt.Fargle

There are a pretty fair number of people from all of those demographics who'd be perfectly willing to support something they like.

It's just that they'd rather do it on their own terms, and the second a fixed price gets slapped on the matter, they go right back to pirating.

doublepost

edited 27th Jul '11 4:05:55 AM by Ever9