We have already established that stealing tangible goods is not the same thing as “stealing” copyrighted information. I understand that you’re not really attempting to say they are analogous things, but let’s not muddy the waters here.
Downloading is not stealing money directly out of RIAA’s pockets. In theory, it unfairly reduces demand because the supply can be replicated and distributed freely. In theory, as well, it can also increase demand by serving as a venue for otherwise relative unknowns. Which one of these theories is proving to be in effect? If it’s the latter, should we still conclude that file sharing is a terrible thing (legality aside)?
No one in this thread has proved that “some other sap is paying for it”, though. If CD sales has remained pretty consistent through the years, should we conclude that downloaders have stopped buying CDs but non-downloaders are buying more CDs (out of the kindness of their hearts) to make up for it? Or should we conclude that the fears about no one buying music anymore are unfounded?
In that example someone actually does lose something. All by it insignificant compared to his total networth. In my examples no harm was done. If someone was like “I like singer, I want his cd. I’ll go buy, wiat I could just download it and burn it my self” that would be wrong. However if someone was not going to buy it anyway, maybe they are broke, maybe it’s out of their price range, or maybe they don’t sell copies anymore, I don’t see what damage was caused.
I agree with this if you would have bought it then you should find a way to compensate the author.
Without a suitable application of high explosives? Probably not. There are alternatives, however, to RIAA’s mindset. Todd Rundgren has started Patronet to use the internet and file sharing as a way to help unknown bands promote themselves. Marillion had problems getting their label to come up with the cash for a new album, so Marillion went to their fans and basically said, “You guys cough up the money so that we can cut a new album, and we’ll let you download it before anyone else gets their hands on it.” Apparently, it worked well enough that they’re doing a second album the same way.
This technology’s only a few years old, so folks are still poking around with it. I imagine that we won’t see a total shift away from the RIAA dominated industry until the kids who’ve spent all their lives growing up with MP3’s and filesharing are running things.
I think Fish brings up a very good point here. It’s not just about profits lost (or not lost, depending on who you ask) it’s about the loss of control the copyright holder experiences thanks to filesharing (or just distributing without permission). And yes, I emphatically believe that the copyright holder is entitled to that control. And just so we’re clear here, I’m not really talking about the RIAA so much here; I’m talking about people like Fish, and me. We are not big corporate entities, we are just ordinary people who are increasingly frustrated by a sense of entitlement people get about using anything they can grab—even if they are not legally entitled to it, and are not given permission to use it.
I produce artwork and photography. I show them on the web, but they are “low-res” versions, because I don’t want others to get their mitts on them and do too much damage (i.e. publish them, not give me credit, etc.). As it is, I know that people are using my photos and artwork and not crediting me! (I once caught a bandwidth thief linking to one of my drawings on her web log, which she claimed was drawn by her “cousin in Budapest” ) People are bizarre, and shameless. They will steal (and YES, it is stealing from me when someone says that a drawing I did was actually done by their cousin in Budapest). Stealing credit away from me. So much for the “free publicity” myth—no one knows that I did the work that is being distributed against my will, so certainly I am benefiting not at all from the “exposure”.
But still, I will show off my work. Just bits of it. Low-res versions of it. I would love to share higher-res versions, but I daren’t do that, because the thieves would have a field day, wouldn’t they? So, because of the blatant sense of entitlement so many people have, I have to be careful what I show, be extra vigilant, and even then, I know that the thieves will still try to use what is not theirs.
**That is exactly what I am saying, and I don’t know how anyone could infer anything differently. To simplify: the copyright holder is out the money you owe him for using his property. You owe him money. You refuse to pay him. Is this really that difficult?
Plagiarism and “bandwidth theft” are rather different from copyright infringement.
Both can be averted with technology, though: put a watermark, comment, or overlay in the picture that identifies you as the artist, and use a script to prevent people from loading the file from your server unless they go through one of your HTML pages.
Has anybody here considered how technologically difficult it would be to even implement an idea like this?
No normal virus has the potential to cause physical damage to circuit boards, processors or hardware devices, in fact the most that’s possible with a normal virus if you want to be really nasty is to corrupt the boot sector and make it necessary for the person to low level format the hard disk. In order to actually fry someone’s computer by means of software, someone would have to write a virus that attacks the BIOS, hoping that contained somewhere in that BIOS/CMOS (since both of these are commonly on the same chip nowadays) there’s a CPU Soft menu that allows control of things like CPU voltages, power to the cooling fans, etc. A program like that might be possible to write, but it’d be nearly impossible to execute remotely on someone else’s machine for several reasons. Every BIOS/CMOS manufacturer makes their product slightly different, and the variances also occur between various models of chips from the same manufacturer, which is why flash updates have to be extremely specific to the exact model of chip being updated. This information is something the computer’s owner often has, but not something easily found by a person who wants to send a virus to a computer. Beyond that, I’m not aware of many programs that can make changes to the BIOS or CMOS that are run from anything other than a bootable disk (floppy disk or CD-ROM) that performs such changes before the operating system kernel starts up and takes control of BIOS communication with devices. The maker of a computer-hardware-destroying program has not only to figure out the exact model of BIOS/CMOS chip, but also a way around the OS kernel itself in order to gain direct access to the chip. And that’s if they can get their program onto the specific computer in the first place, which considering there are a large number of mp3 and ogg loving geeks out there who are quite adept with firewalls, proxies, and keeping unwanted intruders out (for many of us geeks, our job involves keeping out the hackers and crackers). If they’d like to rely on operating system back doors, they’ve got to bank on an operating system version and release that has such back doors in existence and that hasn’t been patched to plug the holes. This would probably be easiest with Windows, and would likely be a total nightmare for any system running a version of Linux considering that the vast majority of Linux users range from mild to severe editing of the operating system itself, and that the viruses would also have to be written in as many versions as there are operating systems (the X86 version will not work on a Sparcstation running SuSe for example).
Could they possibly, potentially destroy a handful of computers under totally ideal conditions? Yeah, it’s possible in that no computer is 100% totally safe from every attack, but Hatch’s plan, as big and bad as it sounds seems kinda doomed to be a technological failure from the get go. IAAComputer Engineer and in my (I think) qualified opinion, this whole plan sounds a lot like a techy scare tactic. Some day perhaps technology will prove me wrong, but at the moment it seems to be beyond the range of practical possibility.
Now back to your regularly scheduled debate over whether downloading music is ‘theft’.
So you are saying that the copyright holder is losing money.
OK, now that you have said it, could you possibly even attempt to prove it?
Prove that if a cd is out of print, the copyright holder loses money when you download it.
Prove that if you have no money, the copyright holder loses money when you don’t give them your nonexistant money.
In other words prove that if you would not or could not have bought something, that money is actually LOST.
You may want to go back to your argument that the copyright holder is merely losing the satisfaction of keeping people from hearing the music they own the copyright for, because at least that argument was somewhat supportable.
You mean when someone displays my artwork and says it is by their cousin in Budapest, they are not violating my copyright? And I would emphasize—they display it, as in publish on the web. That’s a copyright violation, is it not? If they display it on their wall at home, I’d have no way of finding out about it, would I?
I don’t do the Digimark watermark; it’s rather expensive to maintain and that watermark is pretty fragile. I do put text on the larger lo-res images, and when I see a bandwidth thief who is displaying an image with my URL and copyright notice on it, I don’t get so pissed about it. (But I do get pissed about the bandwidth theft, so I usually replace the stolen image with a picture of something completely different.) It’s quite impractical to put lettering on the thumbnails (but I sometimes do anyway) because all the information I’d want to put on the thumbnail would partially obscure the thumbnail
I tried that on my site, but I guess I am not technologically advanced enough to figure it out. But thanks for the suggestion—how exactly does this relate to the fact that people are stealing my content and violating my copyright? Even if I made no effort to identify my graphics, does it mean that it’s OK for people to steal them and violate my copyright?
No, it doesn’t make it right. No one is arguing that. However, it would be more wrong to prevent it by resorting to the heavy handed tactics of the RIAA and whatever senators are in their pocket.
There are already things you can do on the internet to preserve the artwork that is yours, from watermarks to lo-res images. They may be ineffective, but they’re a damn sight easier than pushing DRM technology through congress, and they don’t deny people’s freedom.
Here’s a suggestion: when you find someone stealing your artwork, send them a nasty email telling them to take it down by a certain date. If they ignore you/respond saying it’s theirs, send them another email threatening legal action. Odds are, 99% of people will be gracious enough to take it down, and the last 1% probably isn’t hurting your business, if any of them are. Of course, save every email and make sure you have proof that you created your pictures, and things will go smoother for you.
Question: how are you making money off of your pictures? Are you licensing them to other websites to display, or are you selling them in physical form? In either case, another possibility is to put a prominent watermark directly in the middle of the picture, making it difficult to remove. Something like “proof” or “sample.” If I remember correctly, photographers often do this to sample pictures.
My point is, you shouldn’t complain about people having the ability to infringe on your copyright without examining all your options first. I would rather see you protect yourself than see everyone else hamstringed for your sake.
Yosemitebabe - Taking credit for someone else’s work is very different than downloading it for your own personal use. Would you really mind too much if someone downloaded a picture you had on your website, just so they could look at it while offline? Almost all file sharers would be very much against downloading an mp3 and renaming it to take the credit. In fact, it is the RIAA which is more likely to think mislabeling mp3s is a good idea!
InquisitiveIdiot, I am well aware of the precautions I am expected to make to just protect my own work. And just for the record, no where have I suggested that I support Hatch’s far-fetched and bizarre scheme. I just don’t think that some of the rationalizations here for theft or copyright violation hold much water.
As I mentioned before, I do mark my graphics so people know they belong to me. (Except for the small ones, which are difficult to mark effectively.) I also have a big honkin’ message on each and every web page where graphics reside, explaining that they are copyrighted by me, and that no one is given permission to publish them. I also link to a page where I outline my terms for selling limited rights to my photos. I also explain what is and is not permissable use of my photos. For people to ignore this very obvious message means that they don’t give a damn; they just don’t care. They want what they want and they will steal it. Like I mentioned before—the sense of entitlement is astonishing in some people. They figure that anything on the web is free for the taking, and will blatanty ignore any warnings or notices stating otherwise.
Nightime: Just FYI, I give permission my my “terms” page for people to download and view my photos on their personal computers. It’s such a little thing, and I figure people are going to do it anyway (hell, the photo is stored in their browser cache!). And, I give them permission to print out a copy on their inkjet printer and display it on their wall. I just don’t give them permission to print out a whole slew of them and distribute them, or to have the photos published on the web.
And see, that’s my choice, to give permission for people to view my photos offline. I get to choose how my works are distributed. I state what my terms are, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to expect people to abide by my terms.
Personally, I don’t think it’s so grievous for someone to make a copy of something for a friend to see (i.e. copy of a CD, etc.). Because it’s just one copy. But if that person were to distribute that copy hither and yon (like in file sharing) so that everyone could get a copy, it’s a different kettle of fish. But even then, I concede that a lot of people download music that they will buy, or already own. (I confess—I downloaded a copy of Jerry Goldsmith’s score to “Powder”. I own the damned CD, but since my move, I can’t find it! So I felt no guilt in downloading the music from a CD I already own.)
If the RIAA has a problem with my practices (and I daresay they would, greedy pricks that they are) I think they are full of shit. But to not be crazy about the “sense of entitlement” people have about anything online? No, I’m not crazy about it, and I don’t see why anyone else should be either. (Unless, of course, they are the ones that are greedily grabbing anything they can get their mitts on. Obviously, they are on the receiving end; they want free stuff without paying for it.)
Depends how they do it. If they download the image from your web server to theirs, and serve the file from their web server, they’re distributing your image and violating your copyright. On the other hand, if they just link to the image on your web server, you are (unwittingly) distributing the image.
“Bandwidth theft” is a technological problem: you have directed your web server to hand the file out to everyone who asks, whether they were referred by one of your pages or someone else’s, and now you’ve decided that you didn’t really mean everyone. The solution is to fix your web server.
If they say their cousin in Budapest made the image, that’s plagiarism, but I doubt it can be classified as copyright violation.
What about a JPEG comment? It’s not usually visible, but it stays with the file.
They are publishing my graphic on their web page. Not only are they stealing my bandwidth, they are putting it on their own web page.
It would be a preventative measure, but does not really address the fact that people are not entitled to publish my pictures without my permission.
Could we get some definitive cites on this? Because I don’t think either of us really know, do we?
While I completely believe that the spirit of copyright law has been violated (they are displaying my graphics on another totally unrelated web site, against my wishes and not with my permission) it’s possible that there may be some loophole there. But either way, it still is not OK to do that. It’s not OK to distribute my graphics on another web site. And it’s sure not OK to leech my bandwidth as well.
I thought I’d addressed that. Watermarking is fragile, (one or two runs through Photoshop, and sometimes it’s gone). Maintaining a watermark service (like Digimarc) is expensive, especially when you have as many photos and graphics as I do.
So what’s your point, then? Does the fact that people are greedy bastards who have a selfish feeling of entitlement mean that I should just suck it up and accept their theft?
They have the same “entitlement” to reference your image as anyone does to link to any other site. How much entitlement that is is for the courts to decide, but note that if no one were allowed to link to other sites, there would be no web.
Remember, they aren’t distributing the picture. You are, through your own web server. When Joe Surfer goes to their web site, they tell his browser “Hey, this page would look even cooler if you went to yosemitebabe’s web server and loaded this picture.” Then Joe’s browser connects to your web site (assuming he has images enabled) and asks for the picture. Then–the most important step, and the only one relevant to copyrights–your web server sends him the picture.
Yeah, they’re being jerks if they link to your images. But there are ways around that - technology lets them leech your bandwidth, and technology lets you put a stop to it.
I don’t mean watermarks, I mean text comment blocks embedded in the JPEG file. Many editors can read and write the comments (including Photoshop and GIMP, IIRC), or you can use a separate program like this one. They’re separate from the image data, so they won’t be broken when you re-compress the picture.
My point is that “bandwidth theft” is not a copyright issue. If you put a file on your web server with no access controls, it’s silly to expect the web server not to serve the file when other sites link to it.
If you don’t want them using your bandwidth, fix your web server. Many sites already do this - download sites make you go through a page before you can get the file, public web hosts like Geocities won’t let you link to images from outside, etc.
Go after them for denying you credit, not for linking to a file on your server. I believe the successful “deep linking” cases were the ones where one site linked to an article on another site in such a way that the article seemed to be created by the authors of the first site.
Oh, but they are not linking to simply a site—that is something few of us have a problem with. They are linking to a specific non-HTML file, like a graphic. Showing the graphic, as if it is their own, on their server. Because let’s be honest—how many people check the URLs of an embedded graphic, just to see if the graphic really “belongs” there?
But they are knowingly leeching my graphic, against my wishes. They must know this, because there is a notice on each and every page of my web site (where they go to look for photos to steal).
Yeah, I know all of this. And Joe Surfer is completely unaware of this transaction. He’s just looking at the picture.
Sigh. Yes, yes, I know all of that. That’s how I catch the bandwidth thieves, remember? My host’s web logs tell me who’s referring to my pages. But the fact still remains—the webmaster who willingly linked their web page (usually embedded into their web page) to my server had to know ahead of time that they did not have permission to show my picture on their web site. And because of their selfish sense of entitlement, they do it anyway.
And you are right on that—I need to get over that learning curve (providing my web host allows for some of these precautions) and figure out how to stop them. But you will agree, that the people who leech bandwidth are leeches, no? Stealing someone else’s content, and bandwidth, against their will—well, they have to know that it’s stealing, and wrong—but they do it anyway.
Ah yes, I see what you mean. Yes, I know about that. And that’s fine, but it won’t alert Joe Surfer that the graphic he’s viewing is actually stolen. And even if Joe Bandwidth Thief and Joe Content Thief know about the embedded text, so what? They will steal it anyway. (And just to make this clear, you can damned betcha that for every bandwidth thief I am aware of, there are probably 10 more thieves out there who are copying my graphics to their own webhosts, and serving them up on their own servers. And that is definitely copyright theft, no?)
I don’t expect the web server to do anything other than what it is designed to do. But I do expect that other webmasters out there could use some common restraint and decency and not steal my bandwidth, my content, or both, especially since I have big honking statements on each of my pages saying that it is not permissable (or legal) to do so.
Yeah, seriously, I understand this part. Really, I understand it.
I’m sure you are right—but aren’t these things all connected with the blatant and greedy sense of entitlement I’ve been talking about here? If someone flat-out steals my graphics and shows them on their page (with their server) that’s obvious copyright theft. If someone steals my bandwidth, they are stealing my bandwidth, and stealing my content without giving permission or credit. Damned theives, all of them.
Legallly, yosemitebabe would at least seem to have some precedent on her side. Linking to someone else’s images and displaying them as your own can be considered infringement.
Morally, whether or not she could prevent someone from using her images without her permission would seem to irrelevant to the question of if it is wrong for them to do so.
) People are bizarre, and shameless. They will steal (and YES, it is stealing from me when someone says that a drawing I did was actually done by their cousin in Budapest). Stealing credit away from me. So much for the “free publicity” myth—no one knows that I did the work that is being distributed against my will, so certainly I am benefiting not at all from the “exposure”.