Sorry all, my GF has decided she’s missing me too much and is coming to see me for a few days. 
So, no replies from me this weekend.
Some of you have made interesting points I’d like to respond to; I’ll try next week from Monday.
Have a good one!
It’s an easy business model to dream up, actually – all you need to do is create an account for the user to save the game, and create a lot of ‘arcades’ – hardware-standardized PC cafes, really, all capable of playing a lot of games. You go in and pay for time, and they’d maintain your save games for you. This could work on a home model, too, if you made console devices. I just think they’d be way more locked down than consoles today are, relying heavily on broadband internet service to authenticate use of the product as genuine, requiring constant Internet connection to their servers. It’d be a worse experience, of course, as the games would be designed to require phone-home authentication, and companies would just drop support for most older games and lock them out completely.
With all due respect, I think that is incredibly naive.
Content producers have a strong motivation to protect their product. Without copyright law, what would happen? Either content producers would pick up and move to a more protected market and focus on selling to those consumers, or they would rely heavily on contract law and the use of technology in order to control their content. A good example of the former is China. The market is so poor there for commercial software due to relentless piracy, so what happened? Nobody markets to them. Chinese-language software is far less of a priority than many other languages used in smaller markets because it’s just not worth the time of many companies to release a version that’s just going to get pirated 95% of the time.
A quick run of cheap DVDs and then just thanking goodness for whatever they make? It is to laugh. I mean, besides, who’s going to go to the movies if all content is essentially going to be free fairly soon? People would wait for stuff to come to cut-rate (unlicensed) theatres, or free to their computer, or what have you. Same with DVDs; why pay a premium when it’ll be free in a month at most? It’d be impossible to make the kind of money you do now on the front end, and content producers wouldn’t just throw up their hands and give up protecting their products.
What would actually happen is that content providers would go to a much more controlled medium than DVD. You’d need to buy a proprietary player, and sign a contract with it, probably paying a monthly fee. To play content, you’d need to authenticate your right to do so using a serial number. They’d lock down the things as much as possible. Copy it off? Sure, some people will manage it – but they’ll relentlessly pursue these people in civil court for breach of contract. Get caught playing media that you don’t have access to and get slapped with lawsuits or just plain cutoff from the service. And all of the costs to make all this proprietary technology will get passed on to you, the consumer. Proprietary systems always cost more; there won’t be a ton of different choices like there are for cheap DVD players. And when we move to the proprietary system, will DVD still be around and maintainable for the small guy? How will the small-time content producer deal with a market that is tied up in contractually-controlled players?
This isn’t a guess, either – content producers are always, even given copyright protection, trying to work towards making it more and more difficult for people to copy illegally. Take away any sort of copyright protections and consumers will suffer, not benefit, as content producers struggle to find a model that works to protect their products. Nobody is going to be making mainstream media and just giving it away heedlessly.
Maybe. But it’s a pretty minor one.
Human beings have subjective systems of value. When products are available for free (or practically free), it devalues them. People will pay some amount for convenience, and occasionally for principles, but in general, people go for the cheap thing.
Let’s say a new-run DVD or digital download costs $15 for a movie today on the day it’s released. A content producer in a no-copyright system is going to be facing an extremely short window of time in order to make any profit from ‘the first run’, the temporary exclusivity. How long will it take a competitor to rush another DVD to market? Weeks, probably, at best, is how long you’d have. For online download sales? You’d have hours. Quite literally hours. No money to be made there at all.
So, the content producer, in order to make the same profits as today, would need to sell either far more DVDs in that time, or at a higher price than today, or both. However, the no-copyright system hurts them both ways. The market will be significantly smaller, as people become savvy enough to wait for the bootlegs to be released quickly or just go right to a torrent site on release day and grab it. At the same time, you can’t honestly raise the price, because then the market shrinks even more – the number of people who’d pay $5, or even $10, to support a producer is a much larger pool than the people who will pay $20 or $30 or more to do so. The more the price goes up, the fewer people will buy, and the less you make.
So what does a content producer do with this? The only real solution is to change the product itself. Either you try to control the product more to prevent your competitors from copying it so quickly (or at all), or you find ways of making the knock-off significantly less quality – I don’t mean a less-nice cover, I mean trying to undermine the content itself – or, lastly, you just produce a lot more cheap content and schlock that has low production values and low costs. What happens isn’t a happy situation for consumers however you slice it. No matter what happens, compromises have to get made by the content producers in order for those knock-off producers to make money, and/or for consumers to get cheaper/free products. That money has to get made up somehow.
Let me close by telling a brief story about the human perception of value. I had a phone call the other day from someone who was calling to try to get a discount on our software. After I explained the available discounts, I helped the guy with several non-related technical questions he had, taking all in all about 35 minutes to talk with him. During most of the call, he was consistently whining and complaining that pirate versions of our software are available. “Why,” he’d complain, “should I pay more than a couple of bucks when I can get it for free online?” His perspective, which I found odd but interesting, was basically that we didn’t spend ENOUGH time and energy going after pirates – and, for that reason, the software was less valuable to him. He complained about several known cracks in the product. I’ve been in the meetings where a lot of decisions got made about how to handle pirate versions, so I decided to be fairly honest with the guy. I said, more or less:
“Well, we have a choice, just like any software developer does. We can choose to make our software very locked down, to try to avoid any potential ways of pirating the product. Realistically, though, if you look at the industry as a whole, I don’t think that works. People are very motivated to crack software in certain circles and there really is practically no commercially-available software out there, at least with any kind of wide distribution, that isn’t pirated someway and somehow. The choice we make is always a compromise – either crack down, and hurt pirates, but hurt consumers, or give people the benefit of the doubt and make the software easier to use. If you say that the software is LESS valuable to you, as a consumer, because we actively try to avoid crippling the software with authentication in hopes of catching more pirates, then honestly I don’t know what to say to convince you otherwise. In my opinion, speaking as a consumer of commercial software myself, the opposite is true. It’s software that makes my life more difficult in the hopes of catching people from pirating – the same people who will NEVER pay for software to begin with – that is less valuable to me. So as to what the software is worth to you personally, that’s really a call you need to make, but understand that inconveniencing pirates goes hand-in-hand with inconveniencing all users. There is really no practical method of affecting only pirates and not at least some legitimate users.”
The guy wasn’t really happy with this. What he wants – and, in my opinion, what a lot of “information wants to be free” types want – is for content producers to say “well, let’s try to compete with piracy!” and make software practically, or actually, free, but still act like a regular company and do things like offer free phone support and all that. In some magical way, content producers are supposed to just figure out a way of making and producing a product for peanuts, somehow, in the collective interests of everybody. Obviously, this just can’t work in most cases – just like trying to compete with legal bootleggers won’t work. We take on all of the costs of developing the software, improving it, fixing bugs, working with users, customer support, technical support, documentation, etc. etc., and those who would copy the software – illegally or not – just don’t have 99% of those costs. There is no way that a legitimate content producer can compete with bootleggers without actively hurting consumers who want that content.
I get that you don’t really care if content producers make money, and that you’re focused on consumers. However, if content producers can’t find a viable model of making money, they will just close up shop. I honestly can’t see any possible way that hobbyists and devotees can make up for practically all of the commercial entertainment and software markets. If you think they can, I think the impetus is on you to explain how.
And in any rational debate, that would be the last word.
Fluiddruid covered all the bases very well, but a couple of corollary issues prompted some thought:
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“Outliers” makes the point that excellence/genius/inspiration is largely based on time invested. A genius is made through 10,000 hours of dedication to the art, craft, science, et al. If entertainers and creators have to get day jobs because they can’t rely on their art for a living, that significantly dilutes most people’s ability to dedicate that much time. Thus, fewer geniuses, fewer breakthroughs, less excellence. Those few who might still be able to dedicate that amount of time will have done so at a great cost, so their work will come at a massive premium, available only to the richest consumers. The majority of consumers lose out – less excellence, less groundbreaking advance, excellence reserved for the rich.
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Those other industries, like technology, that rely heavily on use by creators suffer from massively reduced use of their goods. The technology industry shrinks, development comes much slower and a much greater price. Again, consumers lose. Technology developers lose. Innovators lose. Science loses.
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There’s an accepted meme that tossing out the word “Disney” is some kind of trump card when it comes to criticizing copyright law. There’s a pretty good argument that the “Disney” issue doesn’t hurt consumers, and, in fact, benefits them. No truly innovative creator is in any way hampered by Disney’s control over its characters, trademarks, images, films, etc. They’re going to be looking for their own way to express themselves, their own creations. To the extent that Disney works are based on folktales, tradition, or other public domain ideas or works, other creators are not restricted from using them, so long as they are not copying Disney. Thus, there is an incentive to create new, original, creative expression, which benefits consumers far more than endless copies of Disney works would ever benefit them.
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When it comes right down to it, no consumer has an absolute need to use any particular work. If a creator is being unreasonable regarding the value of his or her work, the consumer holds the ultimate trump card — don’t patronize that work. That’s how the free market works. The creator sets a price too high, and the consumer moves on to something else. That is a far better, more fruitful, more socially beneficial form of competition than allowing an infinite number of exact copies to elbow each other — and any untried, innovative creations — in the market.
Like Alice in Wonderland? The Jungle Book? Little Mermaid? Aladdin?
Define “new, original, creative expression” again for me. Because I still think art, culture and society in general progresses incrementally, building off of earlier work. Where is this wholly creative genius who brought forth entirely unprecedented ideas from out of nowhere?
And let’s have it one way or the other. If I’m being sold a license for a set of bits, why do I have to buy “Casablanca”, “The Maltese Falcon” or the White Album again every time the format changes? Either I’m being sold a license, in which case I shouldn’t ever have to pay for those bits again, or I’m being sold atoms, in which case I should be able to do what I want with them.
Are you suggesting that consumers would be better off with more knock-offs of these Disney movies, or that the copyrights on these Disney movies have prevented others from creating new works based on the original books/stories? If the former then you are entitled to your opinion, but I don’t think many would agree. If the latter then you’re simply wrong – see for instance this list of works based on Alice in Wonderland.
I’m suggesting that Disney isn’t some pinnacle of originality.
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What is the significance of this question? Why should I bother defining it? What’s your point? How would it change any of the arguments in this thread?
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Do you actually believe that not one person in the centuries of history have never, ever, ever considered this question? Do you really believe that you have caught on to something so profound that would completely overturn the concept of copyright law that has actually never been seriously considered?
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Having been given a definition, what will you do with it? The most you will be able to say is that “it is different from my pet definition of the term original.” So, fine, we’ll come up with another word to describe what we’re talking about. “X-ness.” So just replace all the occurrences of the term “original” with the term “X-ness” and we’ll continue the discussion from there. Where will the conversation have advanced?
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Again, you keep bringing this up as if it’s some kind of trump card. What do you imagine you will win, exactly? You posit that no expressive work is novel. And yet you see that centuries of jurisprudence have found that there are protectable, original works of creative expression. Doesn’t that tell you that the law has distinguished between originality and novelty intentionally? What point do you think you’re making when you repeat that no creative expression is novel?
And do you think they’d be more original if they were free to make use of material that is currently under copyright to others?
My point is that information isn’t created, it evolves. Current copyright laws discourage that evolution by attempting to remove large swaths of information from the “gene pool” so to speak. Disney can base his work on Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, et al, but nobody can base their work on Disney for at least 120 years, at least without paying out the nose for the privilege. This discourages cultural progress by discouraging its evolution.
Human progress is made entirely out of information. We would still be apes in the savanna if every person had to figure out fire, how to build a house, medicine, science, agriculture and politics from scratch. Progress comes from making this information as widely available as possible. Artistic works, far from being unnecessary, are a huge part of this cycle. Preventing people from building upon the work that came before retards human progress.
In the past, one had to have a lot of money to afford to have access to even a modicum of human culture. Libraries, music and art were available almost exclusively to the rich. The main benefit of digital technology is that information can be widely disseminated almost for free. Copyrights attempt to conserve the status quo, where poor people are effectively locked out of culture.
I contend that A) nobody is “original”, every one builds off of previous work, and B) that by putting up barriers to that previous work, human culture as a whole is poorer and human progress is slowed.
You just disproved your own argument. Even with copyright protection, people still build off of previous work. Take music - I can’t copy a whole song, but music styles manage to evolve nonetheless, and artists are influenced by other artists. The Black Eyed Peas didn’t have to pay Cher (or her producer) anything for the idea of Autotuning their voices.
Or do you mean that I should be able to write a new Harry Potter book and profit from the ideas and characters that JK Rowling came up with? That hardly seems fair. I can, however, write a novel that features another young wizard by the name of Barry, if I want. It would hardly be “original”, but how do you explain the swath of vampire literature? That’s evidence of authors evolving each others’ work, even with the current set of laws.
This argument annoys me. No, economic theory is not absolute fact. Neither is natural scientific theory. But it’s fairly obvious and seriously basic to the field of economics that supply curves generally make higher prices correspond with greater quantity produced. If you set prices to nil by fiat, suppliers will produce less.
It has already been demonstrated that copyright has the explicit intent (and effect) of reducing barriers to information flow.
More importantly, your input/output/human computer argument about copyright doesn’t work at all. First, it doesn’t work as a legal argument, as the law assumes a person has the capacity to make choices that can be ascribed to them in some morally binding way; if that is not the case, then you cannot punish anyone. Second, the precise same argument you make applies just as easily to the product of physical labour; we intake calories and materials and information and output finished products. Why should we get paid for that, either? That points to something you had not considered: that someone should be allowed to treat their intellectual creations as property because they took effort to produce.
Right, I’m saying both. A) New artists need access to influences. I remember how much poorer I was as a teenager when I had to spend $20 for a CD, which was about a month’s worth of allowances, or two week’s worth of forgoing lunch and saving my lunch money.
I basically just bought whatever my friends liked and classic rock like Jimi Hendrix because it was “safe”. Paying money for new music that could either blow my mind or be absolutely horrible was literally too big of a gamble. As an adult with more money and more access to music, I am infinitely richer and better able to create something novel and “give back” to society.
And B, the granularity, or “step size” needs to be small enough for anyone to overcome. Maybe somebody’s first work would be a minor tweak of Harry Potter world, but 1) there are probably people out there who would buy it and get a lot of satisfaction out of it, and 2), that fan-fic writer’s later work might be much more novel and creative. So we are making ourselves poorer by demanding a step size that is too big for some people to cross.
Nobody is setting prices by fiat. Prices get set by supply and demand. Supply in the case of information already released into the world is essentially infinite, so prices approach zero. Copyrights artificially decrease supply in order to raise prices.
I don’t think this has been demonstrated at all. It has been asserted, however, I’ll give you that.
We charge for atoms because they are scarce. Just as we should charge for the effort that goes into creating information; that effort is scarce. But the output of creation, once it has been created, is not scarce at all. Hence my distinction between intellectual effort as a job, and intellectual property as a long term investment. The former makes sense. The latter does not in our digital world.
This is simply wrong; copyrights simply make information a type of property that can be sold more than once. They do not shift in supply.
Being more specific, abolishing IP means setting the marginal price to zero by fiat (ergo “free information”, the thread title —remember?). Hence, it’s worth producing information if you can get paid enough for it the first time you sell it. However, since that would rarely happen, product supplied would drop. Sure, if you’ve already made an information-based product, there’s no cost to supplying more, but if you haven’t, there’s no point in making the product in the first place unless you think you can get paid enough for it. Hobbyists and people managing to get that first payment would still produce — but they produce already, and a loss of copyright would give them no incentive to produce more. It is simply implausible that the supply of intellectual materials would do anything but decrease.
It’s not a question of “whether we charge”; it’s a question of whether intellectual products are property. Intellectual products took effort to produce; therefore, they are property. And if they are property, then the owner has a right to sell the property to other people; but the owner also can sell just part of it (i.e. the “use” part). This isn’t special to IP, either. Say I own an art gallery. I make people pay to walk around that gallery. The ticket price stays the same, whether the gallery is full or empty or somewhere in between, even though the marginal cost of letting another customer in is nil. How is this situation morally different from intellectual property?
No, it doesn’t. It prevents specific expressions of information from being cloned. No one can copyright an idea. Copyright only applies to fixed expressions of an idea. The last time I looked in the YA section at my local Barnes & Noble it was full of teen vampire romances, but there’s not a damn thing the author or publishers of Twilight can do about this. Where copyright law comes into effect is if someone without the proper permission tries to 1) publish a new edition of Twilight, or 2) lift specific expressions of ideas directly from Twilight. But anyone who wants to write their own book about a teenager who falls in love with a vampire is perfectly free to do so.
You’re complaining that people can’t copy from the same Disney films you just dismissed as unoriginal? Many of the public domain works that Disney has drawn from were much more than 120 years old, and I don’t see what the time limit has to do with it anyway if you’re calling for the end of copyright law altogether.
Since copyright does not apply to ideas, facts, or processes, none of these discoveries would be protected by copyright even today.
Copyright does not prevent anyone from being inspired by existing creative works. It prevents them from copying from existing creative works.
Actually, disseminating information through digital technology does a much better job of shutting out the poor than does copyright. Digital technology costs a lot of money.
There is also already a publicly funded system in place to provide poor people with access to information, culture, and even entertainment. It’s called the public library system. I’m a librarian myself, although not at a public library, and like most members of my profession I believe strongly in freedom of access to information. I do not, however, believe that everyone is entitled to a free personal copy of whatever creative work they feel like owning. That isn’t about information, that’s about property.
Format-shifting (e.g. copying your vinyl White Album onto cassette, or ripping your White Album CDs to your MP3 player, for your own personal use) is in at least some places & circumstances perfectly legal, and in any case no one in this thread has been arguing that you shouldn’t be able to do this.
If it’s a license, the limitation is part of the terms of the license (as made universal by copyright law). If it is physical goods, then many kinds of physical goods come with use limitations – You can buy a hammer legally, but you’re not allowed to assault someone with it.
Current copyright law, in fact, incorporates the notion that ideas, plots, inspiration, archetypes, themes, etc., are universal and can be reused over and over by any creator without restriction.
No, in fact, it pushes creators further to add their own little bit of originality to a new work while reusing the underlying ideas, themes, etc. In this way, copyright law improves on what was before, by forcing artists to the extra mile and come up with new elements to replace those elements owned by another creator. Society benefits, culture benefits, consumers benefit, the human race benefits.
Human progress is made entirely out of information. We would still be apes in the savanna if every person had to figure out fire, how to build a house, medicine, science, agriculture and politics from scratch. Progress comes from making this information as widely available as possible. Artistic works, far from being unnecessary, are a huge part of this cycle. Preventing people from building upon the work that came before retards human progress.
In the past, one had to have a lot of money to afford to have access to even a modicum of human culture. Libraries, music and art were available almost exclusively to the rich. The main benefit of digital technology is that information can be widely disseminated almost for free. Copyrights attempt to conserve the status quo, where poor people are effectively locked out of culture.
Wrong. The copyright system has, in fact, fostered an explosion of creativity over the last few centuries and has made our society far richer and the fields of creativity and entertainment much more innovative.
What copyright law does is to restrict use of those elements that are the least necessary in order to address the universal themes of human concern.
Anybody who can write a worthwhile fanfic of Harry Potter can write that same worthwhile story without using the “unnecessary” elements that Rowling created. A new wizarding school story with new characters and settings is much more valuable to culture than a ripoff.