Does PC Magazine condone intellectual property theft?

Great Debates
1

This article from PC Magazine is making the rounds in my office. Right off the bat, I saw some pretty sloppy arguments (if we can even dignify them with the term), several logical fallacies & a few outright falsehoods in that article. Dvorak sets up straw men & false dilemmas in his apparent attempt at justifying software piracy. Here are his “scenarios”:

This seems to me to be a failure to realize that there was an intent to commit a crime, whether or not a crime happened is beside the point. By this logic, no intervention should ever take place until a crime has actually been committed.

Dvorak makes the sloppy mistake in assuming the Farmer only expects to sell 80% of his crops. Therefore, the removal of 20% of his crops without his permission is apparently not an act of theft. The 80% expectation is a wild assumption set up only to provide support to the “argument”, and is without merit.

I think this is just false. According to the ASCAP site, royalty fees are paid by the media outlets, not by business owners:

Then, Dvorak asks

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. The patron is not stealing any more than my kids are stealing if I steal a loaf of bread and feed it to them. If the liquor store isn’t paying its dues (if in fact any law even requires this), then the store’s owner is the one stealing.

Maybe. I’m not sure what the law says about this. It’s probably illegal to play a CD in any place of business that requires a cover charge to get in. I’m not sure about restaurants/coffee shops/etc. Never the less, Dvorak asks

I don’t see why the degree matters. This looks like nothing but excelsior around a weak argument. At the end of scenario 4, Dvorak weasels out of taking any official position whatsoever (although his tacit position seems clear enough) by asking the rhetorical question:

I don’t know about Dvorak, but when I take my spine into the shop, I always make sure to get a loaner.

This one deals with the busted (last December) “Drink or Die” piracy ring. Dvorak writes:

Here is the DOJ’s press release. I think Dvorak seriously misinterprets some of the statements made. He makes it sound like the DOJ went into the business of illegal distribution in order to catch buyers in the act. That’s not the way I read it:

[Bolding mine]

The DOJ claims they had authorization & assistance from the property owners to carry out this operation. Dvorak’s claim that the government “distributed 100,000 illegal copies of software” doesn’t hold water.

Dvorak really earns my ire with this beauty:

No comment necessary, I believe.

Dvorak winds up scenario 5 with more rhetorical questions that are really misplaced in this argument:

All in all, a pretty poor performance by PC Magazine. Does Dvorak make any good points at all?

2

I’m not sure that a general justification is even possible for software piracy. I’ll read the article, but I’m kinda biased to start.

3

Legally speaking, there was a crime committed - copyright restricts copying of music, not listening to a copy you’ve already made.

Dvorak’s point, as I understood it, was that nothing morally wrong occurred. If you don’t listen to the copy before you destroy it, there’s no actual or even potential harm to the artist, record label, or record store. Therefore there’s no justification for making it illegal.

His example may have been a bit off, but I think his point was that in this case, there was no harm done. The liquor store owner played a song publicly (perhaps illegally), but the result was a net gain in music sales. The artist is happy, the label is happy, the customer is happy. Therefore there’s no justification for making it illegal.

It’s confusion like this that makes people accept draconian restrictions like “digital rights management” and the DMCA: they tend to think that things which shouldn’t be illegal are not, in fact, illegal.

Here is a page related to public performance rights. Public performance rights do not come with the average video rental or CD purchase, you have to negotiate with the copyright holder. As the page says,

Meaning that if you play a song in your bar (a public place), you are expected to obtain public performance rights. If you walk down the street (a public place) with a cranked-up boom box, you’re also performing the song publicly, and you better hope that no RIAA lawyers hear you.

Dvorak’s point still holds: If this were a drug case, would the government deal 100,000 doses of heroin?

The government may have made arrangements with the copyright holders, but to anyone searching for pirated software, the government’s site just looked like another warez site. People who wanted warez got it, and likely distributed it to their friends as well. The government was promoting and contributing to the warez trade as part of a campaign against warez!

If a law were passed making it legal for the government to sell heroin as part of a law enforcement operation, would it be appropriate to legally sell 100,000 doses of heroin, much of it to people who were going to cut it and re-sell it, in order to catch a handful of criminals?

4

Question that probably has a simple answer: If a file-sharing program is responsible for its user engaging in illegal file sharing, is Xerox responsible for its customers illegally copying copyrighted works?

5

If a burglar uses a Stanley screwdriver to break into a house, is Stanley complicit in the crime?

If a thief commits a crime and then escapes by using a vehicle manufactured by General Motors, is GM complicit in the crime?

No on all counts.

Xerox makes copiers for user to make copies. The onus is on the user of the photocopier to use the tool for legal copies.

Stanley makes tools for users. The onus is on the person holding the screwdriver to use it as intended, for lawful means, and not the manufacturer.

GM manufacturers vehicles. The onus is on the driver to use the vehicle to use it as intended, for lawful means, and not the manufacturer.

:slight_smile:

6

Those are all good examples except screwdrivers and cars have many uses other than crimes. The vast vast vast majority of cars and screwdrivers are used legally. That is very different than how things like napster are used. The vast vast vast majority of files shared over napster and the like are copyrighted materials shared illegally. Things that are legally downloaded like source open source software or music where the owner want it downloaded are easily found on web pages ftp file serves.

7

This brings up the concept of intent, especially as it relates to the creator of the tool and the user of the tool.

In the case of vehicles, the manufacturer’s intent is to produce a form of transportation to be used by others. Manufacturing vehicles is not illegal and their intended use is also not illegal. However, if a user uses that vehicle in an illegal manner, the onus is on the user.

Napster is a whole different ballgame. It is safe to say, IMHO, that the intent of Napster from the manufactuer was to create a way to circumvent copyright from the start. In addition, the tool was targeted specifically at copyrighted electronic sources - software and music. It was also marketed to a user base with apparent lack of ethical and/or moral values because they in turn shared those files illegally.

Of course, Napster has legitmate uses. But it appears Napster was designed and implemented from the start as a tool for illegal use. In some ways, akin to burglar’s tools, since the design of such tools serves no real legitmate purpose, especially after the fact.

8

When the media production companies stop charging prohibitive prices for their products perhaps people will stop pirating them (yep it’s an old argument but bear with me).

It cost upwards of £12 GBP for a cd and upwards of £17 GPB for a DVD over here in the UK. Why is that a medium that is cheaper and easier to produce (DVD vs VHS) costs so much to the consumer. I can’t be the only one that feels CD’s and DVD’s are no longer impulse purchases (if they ever were). If I walk into the local Sainsnury’s and saw the latest album by artist x at £5 I may just throw it in the basket anyway, but at £15-6 a throw it requires more thought.

Music has been copied since it started being sold. the media companies were terrified that audio cassettes and VHS would kill their industry, it didn’t, did it? This argument is no longer a justification for such high prices.

Merrin

9

No, business owners pay ASCAP royalties see http://www.ascap.com/about/payment/whocollect.html .
In the “Who Pays” list:
“tens of thousands of “general” licensees: bars, restaurants, otels, ice and roller skating rinks, circuses, theme parks, veterans and fraternal organizations and more”

BMI works pretty much the same way. Next time you go out, look on the door for little ASCAP or BMI stickers.

(I don’t really want to get into the rest of this debate, just to correct the info about ASCAP.

10

When I walk into a coffee shop and hear commercials playing on the radio, am I not paying for the broadcast? It seems to me that a radio broadcast is paid for no matter where it’s heard.

If I’m a business owner, and pay ASCAP fees, does that permit me to edit out the on-air sponsorship?

11

Take a gander at 17 USC §110. Down in part 5, you’ll find an obsessively-detailed blueprint for how one can play a radio in a place of business without being guilty of infringement.

12

If saddam used a Nuclear weapon against the USA is the person who sold Saddam the missile complict in the crime?

If I sell somebod dirty drugs and they OD and die, should I be partly responsible for their murder?

HELL YES! The problem is that Kazaa (and guns as well) fall somewhere in between Nuclear missiles and screwdrivers which is why there is so much debate about them.

As for the Missing Apple case, yes that is damaging the farmer because he is now only going to sell 79 apples instead of 80 since you now feel less desire to buy an apple

13

Oh, and BTW: Dvorak seems to be pushing the laws into the “its technically illegal but nobody cares enough to prosecute you” area and trying to prove that those actions are morally right and, by using this, try and prove that the laws are flawed.

What he fails to understand is that it is far easier to have a harsh law and only selectively apply it than to have a far more reasonable law.

Technically, a 15 year old guy with a pirate photoshop in his basement might face x thousand dollars fine but the reality is that Adobe either dont care or the are non-officially encouraging him. However, if the law changed to say that 15 year old guys who want photoshop to experiment with were now able to get them perfectly legally for free, it would open up a whole legal gray area and a huge number of REAL pirates could slip through the cracks.

Even the whole academic version is fraught with loopholes. At my Uni, we can get WinXP, win2K etc for FREE! simply by connecting to a local mirror and downloading the ISO. These need no authenticaion whatsoever except that you need a student card to get a CD key for winXP. Now I could go up to the office and get ~ 10 - 20 CD keys before they realised something suspicious was going on and, meanwhile, there would be 10 - 20 computers with what looks like a perfectly legal copy of winXP. There would be no way to track down the theft.

14

You know, I wonder what PC Magazine would think of somebody making copies of their articles and distributing them for free to one and all…

15

OK, I went back and read the article. I agree with pretty much everyone here that Dvorak is full of it. Criticisms have already been made, so I won’t waste anyone’s time by repeating them.

16

Attrayant: Have you considered putting your thoughts into a letter to the editor?

17

Possession of nuclear weapons by various countries is not a crime in any usual legal sense. However, use of a nuclear weapon outside of some “international” agreement (a UN resolution?) is a different story. Chances are, the person or group who sells a nuclear weapon to Saddam for use against the USA probably is guility of a crime withintheir own country.

Beyond that, it just get too complicated for this thread.

Are you legally able to sell such drugs in the first place, and/or are you illegally selling legal/illegal drugs? In the case ofthe former, probably yes. In the case of the the latter, yes.

My point is to establish a baseline to set your case and move from there. Define your parameters and the answer is relatively easy.

18

I think better questions are:

  1. What is intellectual property?
  2. What constitutes intellectual property theft?
19

I think the question to be decided first is:

Is the concept of copyright and the protection of intellectual property worth it?

I think that copyright should be done away with and that artists competing for patronage (like in Rome) would be a better system. I don’t think government muscle should be used to ensure profit for artists, as art and other contributions to society should not be based on the desire to simply make a buck. Those who would say that dismissing copyright would stifle innovation and make people less likely to contribute to society probably haven’t looked at open-source software

UnuMondo

20

So your plan is to give more power to the rich? Recorded music and books are very cheap now because the cost of producing these things can be divided among many thousands of people. Under your system things only get produced if a rich person wants it produced.