For the 20th time, I understand the difference between ethics and law, so simply repeating your mantra over and over does nothing to answer the question. Ethically, a copyright holder has the right to control the makings of copies of it’s creation, correct? Why is it ethical for you to violate that right?
Actually, forget it. It’s the same issue I raised three pages and hundred posts ago, and I’m just repeating myself without getting what I call a proper response from you. I’m finished.
No, ethically, a copyright holder does not have an absolute right to control his creation. Should drug makers be able to prevent people in Africa from produce low cost generics? Clearly, your system is flawed.
Need I ask yet again, where you draw the line, or would I just be wasting my time? If the copyright holder has the right to control the making of copies of their movies in some cases, but not in your case, what is the magical difference? They can only control the first 1,000,00 copies? They should only get a 10% return on investment, and then it’s OK to copy? Except for your personal self-interest, what makes it ethical for you to copy but not someone else? I suspect you agree with Dio that, as long as you’re not selling it for profit, it’s not unethical, and, if that is the case, I’ve laid out my problems with that view on page 2 and into 3.
You’re right! The difference between necessary, possibly life-saving medical treatment and copying Saw II on your harddrive for your own convenience is nil!! Fight the power!!! They’re trashing our rights!!! They’re trashing the flow of data!!! Hack The Planet!!!
Yawn.
True. This is already part of copyright law. It’s called “Fair Use”.
No right is absolute. Imagine a situation where a person needs emergency medical care during a natural disaster. In such a circumstance breaking into a locked pharmacy and taking the necessary medical supplies might be the correct and moral course of action. But that doesn’t mean that there’s some “flaw” in the idea that breaking and entering is wrong in the general case.
Sometimes the greater good trumps copyright and patent protections. "Free Movies for Me"is not such a situation.
Yawn. Whether he has a connection to the work is, IMO, irrelevant. He has no right to suppress it either way.
See, that’s emotive language. What a surprise that it’s in your post and not mine.
Instead of “suppress”, is there a friendlier term you’d like to use for when one person wants to prevent someone else from spreading information?
I don’t doubt that he might be offended. I just don’t find his offense to be any more relevant than the offense of someone who’s disturbed by a newspaper article or video game. Sure, he wrote much of the content, but why should that give him the right to suppress it?
Most home users are not the ones ripping TV shows, music, and DVDs, and sharing them on the internet (which is why copy protection that stops the average home user still doesn’t keep the protected content from appearing online).
Oh, I see: you just don’t understand the difference between “most” and “literally all”. I hope you have time to study it before your next English test.
By “such a way”, you mean lying about who wrote it? I don’t think anyone here has expressed support for that. If you want to prosecute people for making false or misleading claims about the authorship of works they distribute, I’m with you 100%.
There’s just something about people fighting against freedom of speech that makes my blood boil. Sorry.
Really? If you called up Blockbuster and asked how many copies of Brokeback Mountain they have, do you think they’d say, “Sir, we don’t have any copies here. We only have original DVDs from the manufacturer.” I think they’d understand exactly what you meant, and I think everyone, including you, understands exactly what I mean when I refer to copies of a movie, book, or any other copyrighted work. In fact, I think it’d be pretty easy to find quotes from people in those industries talking about “selling copies”.
You know, in a way, it’s charming how you keep making wild guesses at my goals or motives, even though you’re wrong each time. If at first you don’t succeed and all that. But there comes a time when you have to be honest with yourself and admit that you really can’t read my mind.
People aren’t given the choice to pay “any money at all”. If a DVD costs $15, you can either pay $15 to buy it, or pay nothing and not buy it.
The question has been answered, though. You think anyone who’s willing to spend money on the production or enjoyment of a movie will be willing to pay for a copy, and I can only disagree. I’d offer myself as an example, but I have actually paid for DVDs and CDs, so while I can say that I’d rather pay for production and would pay for the production of more movies than I would pay for copies of, I can’t say I’m entirely unwilling to pay for copies.
Ah yes, the old “if it worked we’d be doing it” line - never mind that no one has actually tried it because they already have a profitable business model. Forgive me if I’m not moved by his comments.
It’s not my system, so I’m not going to worry about these implementation details right now. I’m sure you can find detailed explanations on the web from the people who actually prefer this model.
I don’t see a problem with having a fixed pool of money (tax rate * number of taxed customers) and then letting artists compete for smaller or larger shares of it, though.
Well, here’s the first part of OSI’s Open Source Definition:
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
This effectively includes the ability to sell or give away the software on its own, because it’s trivial to bundle it with Hello World and call that an aggregate distribution.
Software for which the source is provided, but users are forbidden to share it with others, is not “open”. It certainly isn’t “free” (as in speech), the other common term. If users are allowed to share it with others, it’s effectively free (as in beer) as long as some of those users share it at no cost, which we can assume they will.
Sure. But why’d you bring it up if you don’t want to talk about it? 
That says more about the people giving the looks than it does about the nature of software or programming. If source code is information, then so is a novel.
Likewise, sometimes the greater good trumps freedom of speech and press. “More money for me” is not such a situation.
Your disregard for other people taints your actions and destroys your argument. You might as well argue that it is moral to cut to the head of lines because, hey, who cares of those other people are disturbed!
Tu Quoque. And look up sarcasm.
“Protecting his rights”.
His labor on it earns him that right. When a person moves lumber around for you, he has earned his pay. His labor has value, and you are responsible for paying him back for the value of the labor he did for you. When a person carves and assembles a dining room table out of blocks of wood, the table is his, and should he sell it, he has a right to the increase in payment he would get than if he’d sold the blocks of wood. When a person restores a beat-up old classic car to pristine condition, he has earned the payment for the increase in value to the car. When a person paints a lovely painting, he owns the painting, and has a right to the increase in payment over the cost of the canvas and paints. And, (dum dum dum,) when an author carefully chooses and arranges words to create a greater effect or impact than they had in the dictionary, the resulting arrangement of words is his, or if he did them for somebody else, then he has a right to compensation for the arrangement of words.
This is a concept called ‘added value’ and is one of the major foundations of society. When a person adds value to something, that added value is theirs. If they own the raw materials upon which they performed their work, then the work is theirs, with all it’s added value tied up in conrete form within the result. Now, most of the time people are adding value to somebody else’s stuff; this is called ‘earning a wage’. But when you add value to something of your own, or even create something entirely out of nothing, that thing that you created is yours.
Most ‘value added’ is immaterial; you’re not so much creating things ex nihilo, you’re altering something that already exists. When a carbenter builds a table, he is chopping away wood, not adding it; still, he is adding value, and owns that value until he sells it. The same thing goes for a writer; they are arranging words, not creating them, yet they are still adding value, and the results of their labor are still theirs until they sell them. (Before anybody says anything silly, it’s possible to only partially sell their rights. Any author who requires his name remain on his book has clearly not handed over all his rights to it.)
When you take the results of somebody’s labor without their permission or consent, you’re stealing from them. There are some, rare, cases when it’s morally correct to kill somebody, just as there are some, rare, cases when it’s morally correct to torture someone. Copying a work and refusing to pay the stated price for it is morally equivalent to getting your hair cut at a barber’s and then, instead of paying, saying “ha ha ha, you can’t catch me!” and walking away; or hiring somebody to build you a table, and then, once he’s brought it into your house and set it up in the living room, throwing him out without paying for it.
And you know what? I think you, Mr2001, are perfectly aware of this. (I also think you’re going to deny it and jeer at me for ‘reading your mind’; go right ahead.) Your hell-bent insistence at referring to an artist’s specific work as generic ‘information’, your dead-on insistince that an author has as little to with the book he wrote as unrelated people do, your position that a copy is a copy, and if the author makes it and gives it to someone or if that someone just takes a copy is all the same- in my personal opinion these are a desperate, deliberate assult on the author’s ownership of his content, because if you can pretend the author doesn’t have any connection to his work, then it isn’t immoral to take it without compensation. That’s what your arguements seem designed to do; the certainly don’t have nothing to do with protecting free speech, or whatever.
Of course you’ll deny it. Loudly. With vehemence. And with personal attacks. That’s fine. And what the hey, I could be wrong. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, maybe it is a chicken.
But let me just say, you haven’t a chance in hell of convincing me that an author is unrelated to his work. Hopefully, you won’t be able to convince anyone else, either; the goal of this board is not to spread misinformation.
Okay!
True but irrelevent. Most (or all) persons ripping are doing it from home. They’re certainly not going to be doing it from work, on the company servers. You have to have at least some brains to rip a movie.
I was answering “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.”
This would be ‘shifting the goalposts’, I believe. I did, after all, respond to what you actually wrote.
This is not about freedom of speech.
When I’m honest with myself, I have to doubt that I’m wrong each time.
Emphasis mine. Interesting how, just a few sentences after mocking me for ‘reading your mind’, you then proceed to tell me what I think. Straw Man.
And as if that weren’t enough, that’s clearly not what I meant when I said “people who aren’t willing to pay any money at all.” Equivocation, again.
If that was all that had been said, I might have something to forgive you for. Argument By Selective Reading.
Okay, so you don’t want to defend the position; fair enough. So it still stands that you haven’t proposed a better model with which to wave away the damage to society that would be caused if a glut of copiers drew movie production down to Chinese levels.
I didn’t want to talk about it. I was specifically telling you not to use it as a model of beneficial consequences. You did anyway.
No, it’s not, but you could at least form the argument that at least some of it is information, without relying on scores of fallacies.
Since composing the previous post I’ve realized that I shouldn’t have just baldly asserted this. So, here’s the reasoning.
If someone in America speaks of “freedom of speech”, they’re probably referring to the first amendment. The first amendment is a legal construct. We have already determined that copyright is legal. The relation of free speech to it is covered in “fair use”, and doesn’t grant to right to copy copyrighted content in defiance of the law. Unless the SCOTUS determines that copyright as a whole is unconstitutional, “freedom of speech” has nothing to do with it.
Besides which, what does the first amendment have to do with the morality of the situation? It’s just a law, and as has been pointed out, laws do not dictate morality, and there are certainly things that are legal to say, but not moral to say.
You seem to be confused. See, there’s a difference between holding other people in disregard, and simply believing that some of their requests and expectations are unreasonable. I can respect someone while still refusing to give them some of the things they ask me for. Calling my position on copyright “disregard for other people” is as childish as a toddler shouting “If you loved me, you’d let me eat ice cream for breakfast!”
Er, no. Let’s say I come home one day and see that my lawn has been mowed. Someone came by, cut my grass, and left me a bill, even though I never asked him to do it and never agreed to pay. He has done labor for me. Do I owe him anything? Of course not.
Without an agreement between the two of us about the labor I want performed and the price I’m willing to pay, there is no obligation - his labor is a gift. He was hoping that I’d appreciate his service so much that I’d pay him for it after the fact, or maybe he just thought I’d feel guilty, charitable, or intimidated, but that doesn’t mean I have to go along with his expectations. He’s gambling, and just like in any other form of gambling, he won’t always win.
I agree, but I wouldn’t phrase it that way.
He has a right to demand whatever price he wants for the table, not because of any labor he did–he also has the right to buy a table at IKEA for $50 and resell it, unopened, for $100–but because it’s a voluntary transfer of ownership. If a buyer doesn’t want to pay his asking price, the carpenter is free to say no and wait for another buyer to come along. The buyer can’t have it without the carpenter’s consent, because that would leave the carpenter with no table against his will.
Ridiculous. That’s like saying that if I cut a piece of string to a specific length, I have a right to compensation for that length. It’s an abstract concept, an idea, an attribute of a thing - not a thing itself. When someone buys my string, they take ownership of the string, but not the length, which is an unownable number. I can demand payment before I let them take ownership of the string, but even if they decide not to buy the string, they’re not infringing on my rights if they measure it and then cut their own string.
Close: stealing is when you take something away from its rightful owner. The fact that the rightful owner is deprived of the stolen item is what makes stealing wrong in the first place; any form of “stealing” that doesn’t include that element is not wrong, and can hardly be equated to actual theft.
Nope. See, in that situation, you’re using up a finite resource - the barber’s time. The time he spends cutting your hair is time he can’t spend cutting the hair of someone who will actually pay.
Copying a file, on the other hand, does not depend on the original author to contribute time, labor, or supplies. If I burn a copy of “Oops! I Did It Again”, that doesn’t take up any more of Britney’s time. All the labor she put into writing and recording that song was performed years ago.
Again, if you do that, the carpenter has lost the labor he put into making it, as well as the lumber. If the same were true of information, I’d agree with you, but it isn’t.
I’ve said no such thing.
Truly a pathetic tactic: post something inflammatory and false, then immediately follow it with “oh, but I know you’re just going to deny this and attack me for saying it”. What else would you, or anyone, expect to happen when you’ve lied about what I’ve written and made insulting claims about my motivation?
Nor do I hope to. In fact, I’ve never made that argument. Can you say “strawman”?
It is for me.
Heh. If an American told you “Germany’s hate speech laws really don’t seem compatible with freedom of speech”, would you say “Actually, those laws only affect German citizens; they don’t affect your First Amendment rights here in the US”?
I can’t believe you’re serious here, but I’ll humor you anyway: No, friend begbert2, when I say copyright is a restriction on freedom of speech, I don’t mean that I think it’s unconstitutional. The concept of free speech does not start and stop with the First Amendment, or the corresponding laws in any other country.
I mean that copyright restricts what you can say, print, and distribute. There are a few purposes for which such restrictions are justified, such as public safety, national security, and personal privacy, but IMO putting a buck in someone’s pocket isn’t one of them. I believe copyright infringes on free speech for no more noble purpose than to generate a profit, and therefore copyright supporters are quite literally selling out their freedom of speech (and mine).
Indeed. There are also things that are moral to say, but not legal to say - for example, copyrighted things, when you don’t have the permission of the copyright holder. 
Is it wrong to sneak into a movie without paying? After all, the theater is going to run the projector even if the seats are mostly empty, so you’re not actually depriving them of anything, right?
Well, I sure wouldn’t call it stealing, since you aren’t taking the theater anywhere. It’s trespassing, which is wrong for essentially the same reason.
The theater owner has the right to decide whether you can be on his property, because your presence limits the ways he can use it: just like you can’t drive my car to Chicago if I want to drive it to Seattle at the same time, you can’t be in my closet if I want to spray it for bugs, and you can’t occupy a seat in the theater if the owner wants to fill all the unsold seats with kids from the local orphanage instead. There’s only one “copy” of the theater, so someone has to have exclusive control over it, and that person is the owner. (Whether he actually plans to use your seat for something else is beside the point, which is that by being there, you’re limiting the possible uses of his property.)
But as long as he’s not using the seats for anything else, it’s okay, right?
Read the last sentence of my previous post again.