A ‘product’ is a thing that is produced; that is, that is created. The word makes no distinction between a table and a word document; it is actually common in the software industry to refer to a text document created in compliance with a contract as a ‘product’.
Regardless, this is somewhat beside the point, as is the entire discussion of wether it is or isn’t possible to prevent illegal copying of movies. The question at hand is wether it is moral to copy the movie, not wether you can copy it, and the second doesn’t in any way imply the first. If the ability to do something made it moral, there would be no such thing as an immoral act, after all.
We have already established that the mere fact that something is ‘information’, does not ensure that it is actually moral to make a copy of it, regardless of the ease with which you can make the copy. We have also established that when you make copies of movies you are:
breaking the law
breaching a rental agreement (if what you’re copying is a rental)
profiting from somebody’s labors without compensating them
taking something that doesn’t belong to you (the right to watch/show the movie)
casting a vote for ‘don’t make more movies’ via the feedback effect of sales in the free market
contributing to a movement which, if it becomes widespread enough, will either cripple or destroy the movie industry.
Effects 1-4 are antisocial behavior, dishonesty, disregard for others, and theft respectively; effects 5 and 6 are dterimental to the copier as well as society in general, and therefore are shortsighted and stupid in addition to being generally harmful ot the well-being of society.
Now let’s look at the positive effects of you ripping a copy of a movie.
A) you get to watch it for free.
B) everyone’s right to free information is upheld.
If you have mentioned other positive effects of ripping movies that I have overlooked or forgotten, I apologise, and we may discuss them as you bring them up in turn. For the moment, I will simply respond to these two:
A is a purely selfish benefit; therefore I don’t see it as having any moral weight whatsoever. Your own code of morals might disagree, though I’d have to question a moral code that puts value in selfish actions that are harmful to others.
B is at best a hasty and ill-thought application of the right to information, and at worst an abuse of the concept to condone selfish and harmful acts. It has already been demonstrated that one certainly does NOT have an unqualified right to access all forms of information; I’d be happy to annihilate that position again if you like. Wether you should have unlimited free access to any given information is something that needs to be assessed case-by-case for each sort of information, based on the effects of sharing that information freely. Should people be made aware of what their government is doing? Probably. Should one install a camera across from their neighbor’s bedroom window? Probably not. In the situation at hand, it basically comes down to A vs 6. Which is not a compelling argument that freedom of information should win the day in this case.
So in short, though your arguments to the effect that we can’t possibly stem the tide of ripped movies (except perhaps by raising our children to be moral and aware of the consequences of their actions) are relatively interesting, they are still entirely beside the point. Sure, you can rip off movies. That doesn’t make it right.
That definition would count a haircut as a product then, wouldn’t it? If an arrangement of letters or notes is a “thing”, surely an arrangement of hair must be too. Forgive me if I find that definition lacking.
By default, I’d certainly say it is. Only in rare circumstances is there any moral value, positive or negative, to making a copy of information, and in those cases the primary issue is who has access to it - making a personal copy of something you already have access to is morally neutral.
Morally neutral.
Correct. One out of six ain’t too bad.
Morally neutral. That labor has already been performed voluntarily; there’s nothing wrong with benefiting from it later.
Heh. You haven’t even established that there is such a right to be granted or denied, and the idea that it could be “taken”–as if the movie studio wouldn’t have it anymore–is simply laughable.
What free market? A free market wouldn’t have only one company selling King Kong on DVD. The markets for CDs, DVDs, and other packaged copies of information are founded on the monopoly of copyright. A market where only one entity is allowed to sell copies of a particular movie is fundamentally nonfree, just like a market where only one company can offer phone service.
Or force the industry to adapt to an environment where the product/service they’re offering (selling copies) is no longer as valuable to customers as it once was. God forbid! I just hope this new invention called the “telephone” never takes off, or Western Union might face the same fate.
I agree. In fact, I’ve assessed this particular case and found that everyone should have unlimited free access to music and movies intended for public consumption. “You shouldn’t give that away because I’d rather sell it for a profit” is no justification for limiting freedom, and I wish I could say I’m surprised that you don’t see the selfishness in it.
If you’d like, I can make case-by-case assessments for any other sorts of information you’re wondering about.
I hate to break it to you, but most people who willingly violate copyright already are moral and aware of the consequences of their actions. Perhaps you meant “raising our children to believe that ideas can be owned, downloading a file deserves a harsher punishment than stealing a CD, and Thomas Jefferson was a raving commie”.
You know, you could probably get a significant debate going about this, if you tried hard enough. The inherent variance and intended invariance in a haircut, comparable both to a mowed lawn and a planned sculpture, make it perhaps the most fertile ground you’re likely to find for pretending that we all don’t have a pretty good idea what these words mean. Of course, somebody would probably point out in that discussion that the terms ‘product’ and ‘service industry’ already had fairly accepted definitions long before you got there, and waiters and housekeepers are, and writers and directors definitely ain’t. You find my definitions lacking; I find your redefinitions lacking. The reasoning why should be obvious. (Not that this is directly germaine to the current discussion, of course.)
The word is not ‘access’, it is ‘right’. Making a copy of something you have a right to copy is morally neutral. There are scores of cases where mere access does not give you the right to post something on the interweb. (I hope to god you’ve never signed a nondisclosure agreement with a weapons development company.)
As noted, a blanket disregard for the law indicates antisocial tendencies.
I’m almost disappointed. Does this mean you’re going to concede the argument and declare the copying of blockbuster DVDs to be immoral?
Yep, definitely a disregard for others, and perhaps blind self-delusion as well. Do you actually think there is a disconnection between the labor and the right to control what happens to the results of that labor?
An author finishes the labor of writing a book. Is there nothing wrong with scratching out his name and then benefiting from selling it later?
You have it now, you didn’t have it before, nobody gave it to you; what part of this is hard? And the right to controle the use of your own artistic creation, besides being obvious, has additionally been explicitly granted by both the laws of the land and YOU, when you signed blockbuster’s rental policy.
Don’t be daft. Next you’re going to tell me that it’s not a free market because I can’t sell you other people’s cars in the mall parking lot. More to the point, you’re also avoiding the point. The statement was that you are sending the extremely clear me$$age to the movie studios that you don’t like the movie and don’t want to see more like it. If you actually didn’t like the movie then that’s fine, but since you like it enough to steal it, you may actually regret it when the movie industry decides to react to the fact that the younger, amoral generation doesn’t seem to be watching movies anymore. You know, that could be fun to watch. (This isn’t so much a moral issue as a ‘look at him shooting himself in the foot’ issue. Of course, you’re shooting everybody else’s foot too, so maybe it is a moral issue. See the next point.)
The product that short-sighted piratey-types are rejecting are movies, not copies. This shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. A movie studio spends fifty million dollars making a movie. They make $120,000 back, because everybody else got it from bittorrent. They’re not going to say, “oh, dear, we should have let people bring their disks here and make copies themselves,”; they’re going to say “hmm, people aren’t buying movies anymore. Those damned pirates are ripping us off, we can’t possibly pay off the actors, and crew, much less make a profit, like this.” You see, unlike you, they don’t consider their, er, “voluntary labor” to be dissociated from their profit margin, and neither do all the people they hire and pay to do that labor.
I really like your analogy, by the way, especially the way you use the telephone (a more useful, generally superior device) to represent ‘nothing’ (not so much an improvement). There is not some superior model of movie financing waiting in the wings to nudge the existing model out, what we have here is shortsighted pirates not paying for movies, with the end result that movies don’t get made. They’re not going to make them for free, no matter how much pirates might whine about their right to have the information printed on the inside of Peter Jackson’s skull.
Now, if you actually thought that movies were a blight upon the earth and that the movie industry should be wiped from the face of the earth, then I’d have to agree that refusing to pay moviemakers for the movies they make would be a moral course for you to take.
But you’re still watching the movies. Enjoying them, even. You’re just not paying for them. ‘Moral’ is not the word for this.
Snort. Yes, your snap decision based on blind shortsighted selfishness and with a total disregard for the effects of your actions is a spectacular example of reasoned weighing of the factors involved. In fact I note that you didn’t actually quote the part where I pointed out the factors involved (selfishness vs. results of selfishness). This is not surprising, as weighing of factors had little to do with your ‘assessment’. (“I want” is a factor, singular, not factors, plural; one doesn’t weigh a single factor.)
And the phrase is “You shouldn’t pirate a copy of that because not only are you breaking the law and your own signed word in doing so (rendering yourself a criminal and dishonest), but you’re also declaring in the $tricte$t terms that you don’t consider movies valuable enough to have them made anymore, which for somebody who likes movies enough to steal them is a pretty stupid move.”
You want to hear a dirty little confession? When I was a young teenager, I let my friends give me copies of audiocassette tapes. Yes, I pirated too. You are not alone, my son, we have all sinned! But you can return to the light! A few years later when I grew up a little and realised how stupid it was to avoid paying for the things I actually liked being made, I went back and bought legal copies of the music that I’d recieved illegal copies of. Heck, I even went and bought copies of most of the things I’d recorded off the television, because, by gum, I like the movie industry! I like sending in my little ten or twenty buck donation to the continued production of shows and movies I like! (This is because I don’t think that movies are made of rainbows and light instead of money.)
Of course, if dumbass pirates overwhelm me in numbers and starve the movie companies out of business, I get shafted too (not that your typical self-absorbed mental adolescent would care about that). That’s the whole ‘negative societal impact’ thing, that makes this also a moral consideration.
No thanks, I can do “total blind short-term selfishness” without help. I was a child once too, you know.
Look at the pretty strawman! A pretty dumb one, too; I bet ole’ TJ was at least passingly aware of copyright law when it was being drafted into the constitution. I do hope you’re not trying to imply that he would agree with you in this. We’ll also note that this speculation about what I might have meant includes a remark about the relative punishments of idiots who rip movies, a topic I have not even peripherally approached. Strawman number two!
I will agree that in the US of A ideas can be owned. I mean, you’d have to be a space alien to have overlooked those ™s and (r)s populating the word, proud testament to the fact that ideas are often assigned ownership, in the case of trademarks and copyrights both, for the benefit of the people in general.
You do know what the actual rationale behind copyright is, right? Right?
As for those ‘moral pirates’ you refer to in your unsupportable generalized speculation about the motives of millions of people you’ve never met, you can definitely tell they’re moral and consequence-aware by the way they commit immoral acts that undermine the production of the very movies they’re stealing. Paragons of virtue and foresight, I’m sure.
There is no such thing as “a right to copy”, morally speaking.
Violating copyright is not “blanket disregard for the law”. I know it’s easy to forget sometimes, but there are laws other than copyright.
Absolutely. Remember, the result of that labor in this case is information. You do not have a right to control what other people do with that information, because you still have it. As long as it isn’t private financial data, medical records, nude pictures, or other truly private material–and by definition it isn’t, since you’re offering it for sale to the public–nothing they do with it can harm you. They can’t deprive you of anything except their money, which doesn’t belong to you anyway.
The unethical part of that scenario is scratching out his name, because you’re defrauding everyone you sell a copy to by implying you wrote it yourself. If you leave his name intact, it’s fine.
Scratching out his name seems irrelevant to this discussion, though; I’ve certainly never supported it. If you’re just campaigning for an end to mislabeled MP3 files, then I’m with you. They Might Be Giants did not sing “Puttin’ On The Ritz”!
Ownership of physical property like cars is not the same as the government granting monopolies on the distribution of certain types of plastic disc. Copyright is a prime example of interference with a free market. Now, that alone doesn’t make it bad, but it’s true.
Well, since we both agree copyright infringement won’t be stopped, shall we wager on whether movies cease to be made within the next, say, 5 years? Ten years, fifty years? When exactly is the sky going to fall?
Interesting thought. Maybe if they actually communicated with their customers, they’d realize that people were willing to pay for movies, just not by buying copies. (If people really aren’t willing to pay at all, then the industry is doomed either way.) I guess we can only hope real studio execs aren’t as ignorant and unimaginative as the ones in your hypothetical.
Close: the end result is that movies don’t get made the same way they do today. Just like people don’t communicate the same way they did in the days before telephones. Maybe that’ll mean different financing arrangements (which do exist), different scales of production, armed guards stationed in every living room, or something else, but you can’t seriously think no one will ever make another movie. There are people who value movies enough to spend money on them; that money will find its way to whoever steps forward to claim it.
No one has suggested making them for free. Do you have these hallucinations often?
You’re right, because it’s morally neutral. I enjoyed talking on the phone today, but I didn’t pay Alexander Graham Bell’s heirs anything for it. I enjoyed watching network TV, but I didn’t pay Fox anything for it(*). There is no moral obligation to pay everyone who’s responsible for your enjoyment.
(* “Ah,” you might say, “but Fox is broadcasting for free on purpose! They want you to watch! Movie producers don’t want you to download movies for free.” But I’m afraid that one person’s desires don’t create a moral obligation on the part of anyone else. Just because you want money doesn’t mean anyone has to pay you.)
That’s funny, but it’d be funnier if it were true, you know? I’ve stated the reasons behind my position. You can make up your own, but it only makes you look foolish.
Horrors! I know they say the first one’s free… and the second one… and the third one… but didn’t your parents teach you how to deal with peer pressure?
If anyone ever tries to offer you copied audiocassette tapes again, remember: just say “no”. It isn’t worth it. The sound quality is just too low.
Cool, that’s like when I bought CDs and DVDs of much of the material I’ve downloaded, and then bought a few other CDs from the same artists. Good to see we’re both willing to support artists and we both know what movies are made of.
Yes, I believe he would. He realized that assigning ownership of ideas was insane. The Constitution, however, was the result of many compromises.
I think you know what I meant. Sure, you can own ideas today… in exactly the same sense that you could own slaves 200 years ago. If you only want to educate your kids about legality, rather than morals or the wonder of human intellect, go right ahead and tell them ideas can be owned.
But hey, why stop at what the law requires you to do? Follow the spirit, not just the letter! Think of the quality time you could spend together each night, making a list of everything you all thought about or talked about that day, and then tracking down the owners of those ideas so you can pay royalties. They’ll be glad to know that the nickel they pulled out of their piggy bank for humming “Oops! I Did It Again” will go to buying Britney’s baby a safer high chair.
There are several, and the rationales for supporting and extending it have changed over time.
Such delicious irony. You’ve never speculated about the motives of people you haven’t met, have you? Not pirates, and certainly not posters in this thread.
Huh. I thought we were talking about copyright infringement, which, as noted ;), is morally neutral (when it doesn’t involve fraud), and which has not been shown to lead to any undermining of production.
Please put forth an argument supporting this position, and the stance that information in general cannot be granted ownership. Not just that it shouldn’t, though you need to defend that too; that it can’t be owned, as well. Your stated position desperately depends on this being true, but you’ve done nothing to support this notion but flatly assert it. Based on the existing law and societal conventions, not to mention the fact that we seem to have been granting people ownership of information with acceptible results for years, yours is the outrageous claim and it is your responsibility to defend it, not ours to debunk it. (Sure, I’ve been poking holes in it for a while now, but I didn’t have to. It was more for fun.)
Absent a coherent defense for the outrageous claim that information cannot and should not be owned, your position seems almost ludicrously indefensible. You didn’t contest that the only reasons for the act of copying rented movies are A) base selfishness, and B) this strange obligation you posit we have to let the information frolic freely amongst the rose petals. Without reasonable support for the ‘free information’ premise, you read like a totally selfish punk who’s loudly asserting an outrageous claim in a laughable attempt to give his selfish actions some sort of flimsy moral authority. That may not be an accurate description of you, but it’s sure how you sound to me at the moment. I concede that at times I’m reacting to that image of you.
Also, I don’t believe for one split nanosecond that even a tiny fraction of the people who illegally copy movies are doing it out of some abstract noble obligation to spew information left and right. I mean, come on. Most of these people are doing it because it’s a free lunch. Regardless of wether you’re able to support your assertions of information having rights that trump all, these other guys still don’t have a moral leg to stand on. Motives matter.
Hmm, what else is there to cover? When discussing the question of the moral merit of an action, it’s not uncommon, I think, to speculate what the effect would be if everybody was doing it. The fact that you seem to think that everyone is doing merely means that you, in theory, should be taking the end results of these lines of reasoning far more seriously; for myself it’s merely a thought experiment. One that very firmly underscores the way that copyright supports and promotes the creative arts, I might add.
For myself, I don’t think that you’re correct that most people are going to be ripping movies in the near future; as far as I can see there are lots of people who believe in the right of an artist to profit from his creations, and who recognize the authority of law wether for its merit or because, well, it’s the law. Given how many religions support the principles of obedience and respect of others’ property, I don’t see this number dropping too much from where it is now in the predictable future, either.
Given that, and the fact that moviemakers have a ways to go before the pirates’ unwillingness to pay becomes a serious impediment to moviemaking, I think that there are and will be enough moral people to make up the difference for the freeloading rip-off artists that now and in the future will continue to profit from the labors of others without contributing to the system themselves. This doesn’t grant the rip-off artists any moral authority, of course.
Oh, and please stop with the crap that it’s viable to collect payment in advance of movies being made, or that capitalism will magically find a way even if all the consumers refuse to pay, or any similar nonsense. You have not succeded in putting forth a convincing argument that there’s a telephone waiting in the wings to replace the telegraph. You’re welcome to try again, of course, but stating that it’d just happen (and that therefore actions that in the extreme case would topple this movie industry are moral anyway) is an unsubtantiated, and on the face of it ridiculous, position.
I await your argument for why society should not/cannot grant people ownership rights to information. For giggles, I’m also curious as to what the societal benefits of freely sharing information are as regards to recreational cinema. They bear little resemblance to the benefits of freely distributing source code, that’s for sure.
I’ve never argued it can’t be legally owned. Hell, we’ve seen that even human beings can be legally owned by others. But the argument that information shouldn’t be owned rests on the premise that ownership–which is simply a set of limits on what 99.9% of people can do with something–is a necessary evil, and that it’s unnecessary in this case. If you’d like me to explain that further, I will, but that’s a pretty good summary right there.
If that were true, the P2P networks would all fall apart because no one would share the data once they’d downloaded it.
Now what was that about “unsupportable generalized speculation about the motives of millions of people you’ve never met”?
Since I’ve never said “everyone” is doing it, I wonder… is this just a strawman, or are you trying to say you don’t think anyone copies material illegally? I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you must realize a lot of people violate copyright, because you sure seem worried about it.
Heh, maybe once you stop with the crap that no one will ever make a movie again if they can’t sell copies, or that if everyone refuses to pay for copies, that means they’ll refuse to pay at all, or any similar nonsense.
Actually, I’d say the benefits are similar. Most people’s interaction with open source software is limited to downloading it and using it for free (FREELOADERS!!@1), but the advantages of anyone being able to modify it, redistribute their changes, and combine parts into different works are significant too. Imagine being able to remix video (a la Negativland), make sequels and alternate edits, translate it into different languages and media types, make games and books based on movies, etc., without the tangle of red tape it currently entails. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but it does to me and many others.
Okay, that’s your thesis. I disagree that there is significant evil in granting the creators of a work time-limited ownership of that work. Denial of a person’s right to dictate about their own creations strikes me as a greater evil than that, since many artists seem to be concerned about the ‘sanctity’ of their work; I know that I would be disturbed if somebody released copies of my stories that had arbitrary changes made to them. The distress and deterrent factor that is likely to result from a lack of authorial control alone seems enough to render the protection necessary right there. The societal benefits of encouraging the arts via the financial compensation offered by copyright would seem to be an additional, though not essential, nail in your position’s coffin.
So, please defend this position further. As it stands I must reject all positions that depend on it as a premise.
No, I gather that it’s quite easy to leave the data you download in circulation, and the greed incentive of supporting the continued existence of their pipeline to the free goods is enough to convince them to leave their computer on, or whatever other minor effort it takes for them to support their selfish hobby. There’s nothing at all about P2P networks that implies their users are answering a higher call.
You made a bald assertion of the ‘fact’ that literally all pirates are moral; I said I don’t believe that a significant percentage of pirates share your stated altruistic motives. Notice the difference? You state an unsupported and somewhat unlikely position as bald fact, and I put forth an admitedly unproven position that I don’t believe something to be the case. You are invited you to prove me wrong, if you can.
For the record, you are the only being, human or otherwise, who I have encountered that has seriously argued that it is evil for person to have some measure of control of what happens to their own art. I’ve never heard another defender of piracy claim that position. (They typically fall back on the ‘it doesn’t hurt anybody’ defense.) Ergo my stated doubt that they are ripping movies forthe purpose of answeing that higher call, and the corollary doubts that they (or at least most of them) have any moral defense whatsoever for their decision to rip movies, regardless of wether you eventually succeed in supporting your positions or not.
Um, where are you imagining that I said that I thought nobody was copying movies? Are you going to make me accuse you of poor reading comprehension again? Or is this supposed to be some strange parody of my mentioning that you seem to think that the number of people breaking copyright is going to increase enough to become a bring on these movie-industry-shaking scenarios we’ve been discussing?
More importantly, why do you repeatedly make silly responses to the insiginficant parts of a paragraph, and totally ignore the parts that express what I’m trying to say? You cut a sentence in half specifically so that you could try to hide my stated fact that my speculations on the subject of a universe entirely populated by video pirates are thought experiments. I believe you did this because that part of the sentence proves that your little ‘response’ diatribe there is utterly ridiculous. I will certainly not attribute you with the stupidity required to ask an accusatory, sarcastic question to a comment that I had already directly answered in the part of the paragraph you ‘forgot’ to include. I honestly don’t think you’re that stupid.
Now, let’s look at what you consider ‘crap’:
Copies, copies, copies. You like that word, eh?
Yes, I assert that few or no “big-budget” movies will be made if the makers know they’re not going to be able to make enough sales to cover their costs. Why this is hard for you to believe, I don’t know. Or are you trying to trap me in some silly ‘contradiction’ regarding garage productions or something? People will always make little productions for their own reasons. Home movies, whatnot. These have nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
And, yes, I assert that if everyone refuses to pay for copies of the movie, that means they’ll refuse to pay at all for copies of the movie. This position is flimsy how?
It would seem that you don’t understand the word ‘crap’. Regardless, please refrain from basing arguments on the existence of a viable movie financing model that doesn’t require people to pay for their copy of the resulting movie, unless you have some evidence that there is such a model. Some doubt to this effect has been expressed, so it’s not unreasonable for us to ask for evidence, or at least a reasonably coherent supporting argument.
Lest anybody get confused about what the point of open source software is, let’s all take a moment to note that the benefits of open source have to do with the effect of widespread collborative effort on the quality of the single product. This certainly bears little similarity to the benefit of the free ability of individuals to make numerous independent works, without any necessary gain in quality in any of these works, based off of or assembled from the original work. This is not to say that all the derivitive works are lacking in quality, but they don’t have the necessary gain in quality in the original single product which is the motive for and effect of a properly run open source project. As I said, the benefits bear little resemblance to one another.
You did, however, actually respond pretty much straightforwardly to my request for some possible societal benefits to the annihilation of copyright. Thank you. Personally I am appalled by alternate edits from an artistic perspective, but the rest of your listed benefits, notably the translations, have merit to them. (I would prefer my sequels to be from the original author if at all possible, though.)
Unfortunately all of these (unlike household movie piracy) fall under the ‘easily discovered and prosecuted for’ category of copyright infringement, which make these a mighty long long shot for ever becoming legal, regardless of how the home piracy thing turns out. Tell you what, if you want to argue that copyrights should be returned to their original duration, as opposed to this ‘mickey mouse is ours forever’ nonsense, then I’ll back you 100%. Fair enough?
Some people are disturbed and distressed by anything. An author might be distressed when someone releases a modified version of a book he wrote; a wingnut might be distressed when a newspaper reports facts he doesn’t like. I don’t believe the wingnut has a right to suppress news stories that disturb him. Why should I believe the author has a right to suppress books that disturb him, even if he wrote most of their content?
It’s just as easy to stop circulating the data, and it saves you from having to use your bandwidth (which you may want to dedicate to something else) or leave your computer on. There isn’t really a greed incentive to keep sharing the file, because you already have it, so you’re only hurting people who don’t have it yet; the worst thing that might happen is you won’t be able to download it again if you lose it, or on some networks, you might not be able to download another file hosted by the same people who gave you the first one (since they’ll be busy sharing the first file with everyone else).
More importantly, those files have to make their way onto the network in the first place. There is no greed motive for assuming the bandwidth expense and legal risk involved in making a file available for others to download.
Hmm… no, I don’t think I did. Care to quote the post where I allegedly said that?
For the record, I don’t literally think people who support copyright are going to hell for it. They’re not evil, they’re just misguided. Ownership of physical property is a “necessary evil” in the sense that it limits freedom, but it’s the only alternative to pure chaos as everyone fights for control of every object that isn’t nailed down. If everyone could use the same objects at the same time, there’d be no need for ownership of physical property, and then it too would be an unnecessary evil.
Someone who thinks another person across the country with a P2P client or word processor can actually make something “happen” to his art, however, is probably mentally ill - or he’s about to win $1 million from James Randi by proving paranormal activity.
It is a strange parody of your mentioning that I thought “everyone” was doing it. My hyperbole in exchange for your hyperbole.
Actually, I did it because I was specifically responding to something you said in the quoted part. You claimed I thought something that I did not, in fact, think.
We are discussing copyright, the right to copy, aren’t we?
I’m pointing out that movies will get made no matter what. Maybe the financing will change, maybe the scale of production will change, maybe we’ll never see another Star Wars or Jurassic Park, maybe actors won’t be able to get millions per picture anymore, but film as a medium is not going anywhere.
That position is fine, if a little simplistic (we all know A means A), but it’s also not the one I was criticizing. OTOH, maybe you haven’t really been advancing the position I was criticizing at all. Do you believe that if someone is unwilling to pay for a copy of a movie, that means he’s unwilling to spend any money at all for the production or enjoyment of the movie?
I’ve already described such a model, your pooh-poohing notwithstanding.
Another commonly cited model, closer to today’s pay-per-copy model, is a tax on internet access that would be used to compensate artists according to the popularity of their works. The libertarian in me doesn’t like it as much as direct transactions between artists and their audience, but it offers many of the same benefits.
That’s a benefit, but surely you don’t think it’s the only one! If you had to pay $200 to install Linux, it wouldn’t be in widespread use, and there wouldn’t be nearly as many people contributing to its development.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Who says changes to open source software necessarily improve its quality? If the changes are adopted by users or by a product manager, you could conclude that they represent an improvement in the eyes of the users or PM, but you could conclude the same thing about an alternate edit or sequel that becomes more popular than the original.
I don’t think the hard-to-discover type is any more likely to become legal. Indeed, the recently introduced “Intellectual Property Protection Act” would, among other things, allow up to a 10 year sentence for attempted noncommercial distribution of copyrighted material worth $2500. If you download four old movies (worth $12.50 each on DVD) and make them available on a P2P network with 200 users, you could potentially go to jail for longer than the average manslaughterer or arsonist.
I’m with you on that, and I’d certainly see slashing copyright terms as a decent compromise. Even the original duration is far too long for works like computer software, though.
And I’ve described to you why it won’t work. Bear with me and I’ll explain in detail.
If people were willing to pay up-front for yet-to-be-created content the entertainment industry would be using that financing model already.
You see, making a movie or a videogame is a very risky proposition. Most movies and videogames lose money. But all those losses can be recouped with a single bit hit. Since you know you are going to have some hits and some flops there are two ways to improve your profitability: maximizing returns on hits and minimizing risk on the flops.
This is why movie stars get paid big bucks. They’re insurance policies. A hit will be a hit whether it has a star or not. But a star can keep a flop from being a total disaster. A certain percentage of people will turn up to see Jennifer Aniston even if she’s in a totally crappy movie.
And this is why I know that your “pay up front” model won’t work. Because if studios could get people to pay up front for future content they would be doing so already. They would be doing it because any money they could get up front would reduce the potential downside of the film if it flops. It would be insurance, just like Jennifer Aniston.
They don’t do it because the number of people who care enough about a movie to fund it sight unseen is miniscule. You can’t make a real movie by getting 5000 hard-core fanboys to chip in $5 each.
Now will you please stop pretending that what you’ve proposed is a viable business model?
Net necessarily. I’m not saying alternative financing models would always work better, but they might, and since they haven’t been tried, it’s had to say they won’t ever work.
But they aren’t inherently risky. There are a few companies and genres that almost always do well. The problem is too many crappy movies get made for reasons that have nothing to do with art or economics. The problem is too many studios want to maximize risk in order to maximize reward.
Or you can make good movies at a low cost. I know it’s hard to recognize a good movie during the planning stages, but plenty of people out there have proven track records. Just about every movie Michael Moore, Quentin Tarentino, or Robert Rodriguez has ever done has made money. Why not focus more on putting out good product then trying to hit the jackpot?
But nobody ever asks whether it’s necessary to have such a huge insurance policy for a particular movie. This is largely something that is accepted as gospel because nobody questions it. Obviously, there are instances where it matters, but if you are paying Tom Cruise $30 million to star in a movie that would have done well regardless, you might be making a mistake. Spiderman didn’t need a huge star to do well. Tyler Perry’s movies make huge relative profits. Studios need to realize paying a star $15 million means more promotion, more money for the supporting actors, etc. The scale of the production often changes. This is what leads to many of the flops. Most “flops” have a “bankable star” in them.
People pay upfront for tons of entertainment. Go check the lines for an NFL season ticket for any team. People will put up money to see something they like, even if it’s an unknown commodity. Ticket lines are sometimes a decade long. You don’t even know who will be on a team at that point, yet people pay. People line up to buy a new model of car that hasn’t even been released. Why are movies so different?
I disagree. People just don’t like to lose money. An upfront model when there is no profit to be made is more untenable than one in which money could be made, but neither has really been tried. If I could invest in an upcoming unnamed Tyler Perry movie, I would.
I also think you are neglecting the basic fact that this upfront model is basically a shifted version of what is happening now. A studio charges $10 to see a movie in theaters today so that they can make a movie next year that you will pay $10 to see. If you could garner enough consumer confidence in your company that people knew you’d produce a product they’d want to see, then they would finance upfront. Just sell them a ticket to the next ABC company movie to be released next year. This will allow them to see the movie earlier, etc. I think you could eventually build up enough of a base that the production of a movie is possible.
Tyler Perry’s movie cost 6 million to make. I think you could get 60,000 people to pay $100 if they would get to watch the movie early, and share in the profits.
Without copyright protections, movies wouldn’t make money. Any money. Theaters wouldn’t have to pay to show them, people wouldn’t have to pay to rent them. And nobody would have to pay the makers to own them. How do you envision a movie, that has no copyright protection, will make money? Once the print is done, any joe blow would have access to it.
Although there will always be people who write books, make music, and make movies even if there is no financial reward; it’s simple ignorance to think there wouldn’t be less speech out there without copyright protection.
When people get season tickets, or cars, or whatever, they DO know what they are getting, a Packer football game, a new Boxster. Sure they don’t know if they’re team is, going to win, but they know they will be going to see a football game ro get a car. Not many people would pay for season tickets not knowing if they’re going to get season tickets to Chuck’s School of the Blind, Lady Mayweather’s School for Wayward Girls, or the Chicago Bears. People won’t pay to see an unknown movie, just to go to the movies. If it were just the experience of “seeing a movie , any movie”, that determined whether someone will pay or not, you might have a point, but it’s not. They’re simply not comparable.
But it wouldn’t be an “investment” without the possibility of profits. Take away copyright protections, and there is no profit to be made. While there will be some people willing to invest a buck or two to have a Tyler Perry movie made, a vast majority of people would not.
Once again, without copyright protections, the studio would have no ability to determine who gets to “watch the movie early.” As soon as the movie is shown the first time, anyone would be able to see it,practically for free. I’m sure there would be some problems with quality of the copies, i/e a true copy of the movie vs, a handheld camera in the theater, but as soon as the theater obtains a physical copy of the movie, they would be under no obligation not to copy it, or to show it 80 times a day without charge. The only way your model would work financially would require the filmmakers to seriously limit the number of copies of the film available, and to only show it in their own theaters, where they have complete control over the people who can pay to see it. You would have less people seeing the movie, which is the exact opposite of what you originally claimed was the great thing about copying movies that you rented.
Smaller productions are regularly funded by groups of independent investors. Just google “film funding” and you can find plenty of websites devoted to matching investors and projects. So the No-Copyright-Pay-Up-Front business model isn’t radically different from the way many films get made now. Except for the fact in the NCPUF model the investors don’t get any return on their investment (other than the ultimate pleasure of seeing the project completed). Believe me, if I could convince people to give me money that I didn’t have to pay back to make a videogame I’d be doing that right now!
In fact, many videogames ARE sold as pre-orders. Pre-orders are nice because they help convince the retailers they have a potential hit on their hands. Even so, pre-orders only represent a small fraction of total game sales – it would be impossible to fund a game project on pre-orders alone, particularly if you’re counting on the pre-orders before you even have a demo, a screenshot or a marketing campaign for the game.
Because a football games are a known commodity. The rules are the same game to game and people are familiar with the players and the teams. Fans have a pretty good idea what sort of experience they’re going to get before they walk into the stadium.
Films aren’t nearly so predictable. Say back in 1992 I watch Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive – a gore-splattered zombie farce – and decide he’s the greatest director ever. I send him ten dollars to put to his next film, whatever it is. Will I be pleased two years later when I get my ticket to Heavenly Creatures in the mail?
People will pay in advance only if they know what they’re going to get.
As I point out above, workable variations of this model are being used right now. People make films with financing from groups of individual investors – who expect to be paid back. Companies take pre-orders for unreleased videogames – that only represent a small fraction of the sales needed to break even. If the model you described worked, we would be already using it.
You would be wrong. Do you have any professional experience in financing creative projects? I’ve been in the game industry for ten years. The first five were with an indie start-up that had to scramble for funding for its first game. I know what I’m talking about.
Well now you’re shifting the goalposts. The whole point of this discussion is to come up with a funding model that will function if copyright doesn’t exist. No copyright, no return on investment.
Even with a share of the profits, I doubt that you could get 60,000 people to pay $100 each. 60,000 is too large a number to maintain the aura of exclusivity, which is the main thing you’re selling. You could probably get 60 people to pay $10,000 each. That would give you enough money to get you into pre-production where you could get a real investor interested.
But would you have paid that for his first movie? This model only works for artists who already have a following. How would the next Tyler Perry ever get started?
The whole point of this discussion is to come up with a funding model that will function if copyright doesn’t exist; therefore you are indeed shifting the goalposts.
So, they’re not. Heck, since you never demonstrated how your model was going to deter the illegal free distribution of ripped movies anyway, there’s no reason to think that your position differs from the position under discussion enough to make these arguments “moot”.
No, the whole point of the discussion is the ethics of copying DVDs. I started the damn thread. I understand that’s what you guys are talking about, and I should have made myself more clear, but I am not shifting the goalposts.
It wouldn’t deter distribution. No open system will.
Do share your views on the limits of copyright protection and how they dont’ apply to you. If you’re going to go with Dio’s “it’s not a violation of rights unless I profit from it”, please address the multitude of posts on page 2 of this thread dealing with that issue.
Whups, sorry about that. Your response was aligned close enough with the, ah, relevent sub-topic that was going on, that I thought you were taking about that topic and changing the rug out from under us. My mistake.
And now for a big one. Some of Mr2001’s argumentive stylings have irritated me…
The first sentence dismisses with disdain the mere concept of becoming disturbed by things, poisoning the well. The second sentence, in a blindingly bad analogy, both equates ‘distressed’ authors with ‘wingnuts’ (ad hominem) and equates the author with somebody who has no connection to the work (assuming the conclusion). Third sentence, affirmation of the irrelevent statement from the false analogy: red herring. Fourth sentence, Argument By Emotive Language. (“Suppress books”, my glorious golden ass. No, he BURNS them! Just like [censored for Godwinism])
When somebody uses this many fallacious rhetorical tactics at once, I find myself wondering if they know their position is indefensible by real methods.
If you really can’t imagine why an author might be justifiably offended when, say, their movie is colorized, pan&scanned, cleanflicks’d, or spliced into a music video featuring child pornography, then simply ask the question and I’ll give you my best speculation on the answer, based on moviemaker comments that I’ve seen and heard. And by “simply ask”, I mean leave the crap behind, okay? It’s a waste of time and certainly doesn’t help your argument.
The original position being discussed here is your claim that if most people downloaded movies for selfish reasons, then “the P2P networks would all fall apart because no one would share the data once they’d downloaded it.” (Before you ask, post #186). If this claim were true, then you could have of course applied modus tolens and concluded that, since the P2P networks obviously aren’t falling apart, it would have to be true that most people did not download movies for unselfish reasons. Unfortuntely, this claim is transparently not true, and your statements above do nothing to buttress it.
If you’re downloading movies you almost certainly have always-on broadband, and since you likely are doing this on your home computer, your outgoing bandwidth is probably unused. There is no disincentive from leaving your computer on overnight and letting it quietly do its business, and certainly no reason to actively stop it from sharing the movie again. There are, however, positive incentives to posting content; most people are able to see the benefit of a ‘give a penny, take a penny’ sort of social contract, particularly when they don’t lose any pennies in the bargain. For those so incredibly dense that they don’t recognize that, at least some of the P2P software itself provides incentive; IIRC, bittorrent restricts your download speed in proportion to the amount of content you upload. This has the effect of demonstrating that selfish people have all the reason in the world to allow uploads through their P2P software, and it therefore demonstrates that your claim to the contrary is false.
I actually can respect this direction of argument you took; you kept it basically polite, with a minimum of rhetoric and no fallacies at all (merely a false premise). At this point, though, this line of argument is dead. Um, please don’t keep endlessly bringing it up again, like you’re doing with those other dead arguments? Please?
Give a penny, take a penny. Most home users have limited upload bandwidth anyway for a fixed cost, so the ‘expense’ is a non-issue, and you yourself have said that the laws are next to unenforceable (“Copyright law may be here to stay, but it’s already next to unenforceable, and without some kind of miracle, it’s only going to become less relevant,” post #172) and if the law is essentially unenforceable, then individuals have essentially no risk of legal action, do they?
No deterrent, adequate reason. Greed seems to be a plausible enough motive to explain their behavior that one doesn’t have to invent other, less plausible ones. Occam’s razor, and all.
Gladly! The post where you made a bald assertion of the ‘fact’ that literally all pirates are moral was #182: “most people who willingly violate copyright already are moral and aware of the consequences of their actions.” Putting aside all the many people who are are unwillingly violating copyright, this is about as bald an assertion of as you can find.
Or, he’s aware that it’s theoretically possible for that person to alter the document in such a way as to alter or misconstrue his meaning (like, say, making him sound racist), and then repost the article in such a way that it appears to be the original one. It is entirely possible that enough people would read and believe the false article that the author could never get rid of the taint, in the eyes of the public.
Excluded middle, this time, not to mention the usual vitriol. Don’t you ever get tired?
No, I wasn’t speaking in hyperbole, and I never claimed that you thought anything. What I did say, and still say, is that I really do think you seem to think that in the future, everyone is going to be ripping movies. Maybe you don’t actually think that, but you sure do seem to, to me. It probably harkens back to that quote I posted right below the text to which you are responding to above:
The main difference between you and me, see, is that I constantly use qualifiers and limiters to ensure that when something is IMHO, I actually say that it’s not a hard fact in stone. Wether you actually read what I write… that’s not something I can control.
Pretty much everyone but you is using the word ‘copy of a movie’ to mean “illegal copy of a movie”. You, on the other hand, are trying to slide the meaning of the word copy to also mean “original DVDs from the manufacturer”. You’re doing this with the goal of slyly equating the two, to imply that the manufacturer has no more rights to produce the movie than the haxxor does. The fallacy this time is Equivocation.
(I will concede that my allusion to it was pretty subtle. I believe that is now corrected.)
I believe that if someone is unwilling to pay [any money at all] for [the opportunity to watch, own, or otherwise enjoy] a [legal] copy of a movie, that means he[ or she]'s unwilling to spend any money at all for the production or enjoyment of the movie, yes. I do not believe that these sorts of people be willing to pay for a movie that they’re not going to be given the opportunity to enjoy, and I’ll got out on a limb and say that I don’t think that anybody who’s so cheap they’re unwilling to pay for a rental is going to be willing to pony up the cash to singlehandedly produce the thing and get an ‘original’ (as opposed to a ‘copy’).
That really seemed like a no-brainer. Just in case you didn’t say what you meant to ask, I’ll just say that I also think that if you have people who are unwilling to pay anything to see a movie they know a lot about, can read reviews of, and are pretty sure they’ll like, then I’m pretty certain they’re not going to be willing to pay anything for some amorphous movie that’s in the predesign stage and they know nothing about. Is that closer to what you were asking?
People who aren’t willing to pay anything, aren’t willing to pay anything. I dunno how many of these people there are, but for those who qualify, yes, A = A.
No you have not ‘already’ described such a model; one of the requirements was that it be viable. If you don’t believe me, you still have Pochacco pointing out the glaring holes.
Argumentum Ad Nauseam.
Is that a fixed tax, or does it go up if there are more blockbusters in a year? If it doesn’t, then how are you going to have the money to compensate proportionately during the big years? If it does, how are you going to prevent people from artifically lowering their rates by having a small handful of guys download it officially, and then the rest get (illegal) copies from him off of untraceable P2P?
I commend you for presenting another model, other than the crackpot ‘pay two years in advance for a wish and a dream’ one. If you can defend this new model against all probing queries such as the ones above, then for the rest of the thread you’ll be able to honestly claim that you have described a viable movie financing model that doesn’t require people to pay for their copy of the resulting movie.
The benefits you are describing are those of freeware, not open-source software. Merely because most open source software is freeware doesn’t mean that open-source software (which can also be shareware) automatically has all the benefits of freeware.
I typed up a big huge thing explaining how open source software is developed, it’s specific benefits, how they compare to ‘open cinema’… and then deleted the lot. I asked you to provide some potential benefits of ‘open cinema’, you did, I thanked you, and that’s all good. Can we stop talking about open source now?
I don’t think it’s going to become legal either. At least, not any more legal than it already is; fanfiction authors get away with murder and as far as I know are virtually never prosecuted. (Bad press.) You can’t ever sell any of the stuff you make that way, of course, but you don’t seem to be too interested in that anyway.
Computer software copyrights are a whole 'nother thread, with a whole lot of differences in how it is used, how the ‘author’ relates to it, and what it actually is. Heck, you could call most of that ‘information’ and if you phrased it right, not even get a funny look.
Copyright protection is copyright protection. I never said it didn’t apply to me, just that the law has little to do with ethics, and that copying for personal use is not unethical in my opinion. The “right” extended to a copyright holder is a the law, not some inalienable right.
