The impression you’re denying here is that you’re arguing that noone ever should write anything again. I’m not sure how you missed the reasoning, but I’ll give it to you again: from post #132:
The “pretty stupid” think the author did was that he dared publish a book. You are extremely clear that the writing of the book itself was stupid, since you cover the case where copyright is inapplicable as well. To cement this perspective, you draw an analogy with the accountant. Let’s restore the original content back into that analogy you drew and see what you’re, shall we say, ‘strongly implying’?
‘Would an author spend his own time and money to develop a story for an audience, prepare it for publication, etc. in the hopes that he might be able to sell his finished work to that audience after the fact? I sure hope not.’
You’ve stated both explicitly and by analogy that you think that anyone who authors a book is stupid. I concede that I made the leap from there to the idea that you thought they shouldn’t do the stupid act.
So you’re happy to pay for material if you commissioned it, but if it doesn’t have your name on it, you’re unwilling to pay for it, but will take it anyway? What interesting “morals” you have. It’s a good thing that not everybody shares them, or everybody would just be waiting for somebody else to commission that art, and then you’d have nothing to rip off! (Unless you want to try and convince me that you’ve financed a major motion picture lately.)
The example that this is actually responding to is acquiring naked pictures of people against their will, which I will note is not covered by your list of ‘rare exceptions’. I really do hope this was an accidental ommision on your part, though the way you wrote it it doesn’t sound like it. I also note that you don’t seem to think that a person has an actual right to keep anything private; you merely concede that there are limited cases where the potential for criminal acts against them is so blatantly high that you haven’t a snowball’s chance of supporting the idea that distributing the information is ethical.
I would say that if you actually believe that that taking pictures of that woman through the crack in her blinds and handing copies out to their friends is ethical, then I would argue that you wouldn’t know a moral if it bit you on the butt. The same thing holds if you think it would be ethical to xerox somebody’s unpublished manuscript (and/or their diary, same difference) and post it on the internet. Good grief.
That’ll be a good analogy the minute that people start dying of star trek deficiency. Heck, you’re pushing you’re luck by comparing your desire to rip an illegal copy of Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back with ‘giving everyone access to information, entertainment, and culture’. The noble goal you’re pushing for here is “rob from anybody, keep for myself”. Kind of like Robin Hood. Or maybe not.
As for you, mister brickbacon…you seem rather more reasonable than some. One thing you might think about is what the reason is that you’re copying the movie. Is it for upholding the public interest, or personal interest? How many people who illegally copy material are actually doing it for unselfish reasons?
If the motives behind ripping the disk are purely selfish, then I personally don’t think they have any moral weight whatsoever. Given that, the, um, ‘relatively small’ moral problems inherent in breaking the law, evading the spirit of a mutual rental agreement, and taking advantage of somebody else’s labors without compensation go unopposed, it would seem that the ‘total ethical score’, so to speak, is negative.
Remember, nobody said that ripping movioes had to be as unethical as, say, murder. Just that it is, in fact, unethical.
That’s funny, because I’m not claiming information belongs to me (or anyone). You are. Copyright supporters are the ones who believe information can be owned; they’re the ones stamping their feet and shouting “MINE!” when someone else wants to make a copy.
Once again, legality is not ethics. By your logic, it would be unethical to help a slave escape from his legally recognized “owner”.
Incorrect. Read what I wrote again, but this time, try to understand it. Writing the book isn’t stupid, and I never said it was; what’s stupid is investing all that time and effort to write a book for nothing in the hopes of profiting in the future from a business model that’s fundamentally unsound.
Of course, that is what most authors and musicians do today. And it is stupid, not because there’s anything wrong with writing books or music, but because they’re relying for their profit on an essentially unenforceable law that prohibits an act anyone can–and millions of people do–commit in their own homes for very little cost and with hardly any risk of being noticed. Basing your business model on the assumption that information won’t be shared is as dumb as basing it on the assumption that heat won’t flow from hot places to cold places, or objects you throw into the air won’t fall to the ground; the assumption will only hold up in rare situations that require constant maintenance, which isn’t compatible with the idea of customers buying a disc at the store and then taking it home to listen to it.
I don’t know what “having my name on it” refers to. I think I’ve explained my position here well enough: I’m happy to pay someone to create an original work, but once it’s been created, I believe it’s free for anyone to enjoy. If the creator wants to be paid for creating it, he can do what everyone else does and ask for money before he starts work on it.
Oh no, the sky is falling!
Let’s think for a second about just what would happen if people stopped creating art. There are people in this world who like art, and especially like being exposed to new art, right? You might say they value it. If new works stopped being created, these people might be tempted to offer some of their money to pay someone to create new works. They might (collectively) offer more and more until someone took them up on their offer. You know, like what happens in every other market.
Really, this isn’t such a hard concept to grasp. We’re all familiar with paying people for services. Some people just seem to have a hard time realizing that artists don’t simply manufacture a product, they provide a service.
There’s that lack of reading comprehension again. Is English a second language for you? “Such as” means “including”; the list I gave was not exhaustive.
And if my aunt had a penis, I’d argue that she was my uncle.
It’s for personal interests, but I think it’s important not to overvalue the intent of the actor when evaluating actions. Ethics, IMO, are more about the act than the intent.
I don’t think it’s purely selfish.
Emphasis on small.
Good point, but it is important to note that the rental agreement is a legal agreement that is more concerned with limiting liability than rectitude.
But they have received compensation, and will continue to receive it from Blockbuster, et al. This compensation also comes from those who desire to own a commercial copy of the item.
Your first sentence on the subject was “The author was also being pretty stupid, spending two years on his life on something that there’s really no logical way to profit from.” I then assumed that you actually meant what you said: that if an author can’t profit from his book, then writing it was stupid. I sincerely apologise for assuming that you actually meant what you said.
Presuming a universe of people who consitently break any law that they can get away with, then yes, that’s stupid. Note that it’s also stupid, by this logic, to own a car or house; it’s easy enough to get in wether you lock it or not.
Note also the fact that making material for sale, prior to having a guaranteed buyer, is the premise of the entire research and development and manufacture industry. Do they wait for you to pay for the chair before they throw down the time and money to design it, build manufacturing equipment, gather the raw materials, cut and and assemble them, and ship the finished product to your store? Hell no. How about the design and research that goes into making new medicines? Do they collect the money from you in advance? No. Movie makers and authors aren’t unique in their ‘stupid’ strategy for making a product without a known audience; virtually everyone does it. I will come back to the reason WHY in a moment.
Custom-ordered products, particularly ones that involve a great deal of design and time to create, often make reference to the person who provided the capital. I didn’t know this was complicated; I shall try to be very simple and literal when writing to you in the future.
Oh, and as noted: Virtually no one asks the consumer for money before they start working on a substantial project. Welcome to reality.
Again, I will note that there is no market that created works based on this strategy.
Now, let’s actually think about what what you’re proposing. Suppose it takes, oh, $10,000,000 to make this movie that you want to see. Are you going to pay for it? I thought not. Nobody is. Period.
I could stop there, but I’ll go on, because there actually are a few situations where “these people” act as a collective to purchase extremely expensive items for public consumption: highways, for one. Road systems. Dams. Catching on? The mechanism for the collective will of the people is the government. You give them money along with some vague instructions as to what you want done with it, they appoint some decision makers, these decision makers decide what’s actually going to be made and how, and they pay for it to be made. This works fairly well for roads and dams, because for the most part the decision makers have the same goals that the people want. But do you really want the government commissioning all the books and movies?
And don’t try to tell me that private non-government collectives would be formed to make the movies you want. Even the hottest patron of the arts won’t want to pay more then $500 a pop for his entertainment, and you’re still talking about getting twenty thousand of these guys together and praying that they agree on what to make, and then guess what: you’re going to get the kind of movies that people who pay $500 buck a pop like to see. Lemme give you a clue. It’s not what’s on your shelves.
In short, your proposed plan is ill-concieved and totally unviable in any practical application.
And what service might that be? Other than making the product, that is. Or is everything a service industry?
Regardless, let’s pretend for a moment that moviemaking is a service industry. Yes, we pay $12 to get our hair cut. $6 to that waiter. $200 to that auto mechanic (not counting parts). If we’re really hot stuff, we might pay somebody $5000 to spend a few weeks custom-making some furniture for us. Does this scale up to you personally hiring George Lucas to make another star wars? Not a chance.
Guess what? If you scale an ant up 10000x, it doesn’t work either. Funny, that.
“Such as” means ‘for example’. Welcome to the language! The examples you provided were cases where, as I noted, limited cases where the potential for criminal acts against them was so blatantly high that you hadn’t a snowball’s chance of supporting the idea that distributing the information is ethical.
Still, I’m glad to hear that you don’t consider freedom of information to be inherently without limits, particularly in cases where the, ah, ‘source’ of that information chooses to control who the information goes to. That was the point I was trying to make, after all.
That seems like a strange way to look at ethics. The act of sacrificing your life, with the intent of saving others, is unethical then?
I don’t know that I want to get into this sort of debate here. (Heck, I don’t even draw a distinction between ethics and morals. Shows how deeply I think about it.) I just want to say that your persective on the matter here seems a little strange to me.
Okay, from the pure perspective of action without intent, how is it not purely selfish? We’re talking about making copies for yourself of rented and borrowed movies, right? Who does that benefit other than yourself?
Even if you’re talking about the mere act of pushing the button that says ‘copy’, and ignoring all other effects of that action, that action still has the ‘relatively small’ moral problems of evading the spirit of the rental agreement, taking advantage of somebody else’s labors without compensating them, and breaking the law. Doesn’t it? I’m honestly curious how you’re approaching this; I can’t think of any unselfish positive effects at all of copying the movie, much less enough of one to outweigh these negatives.
I did mean what I say. But what I meant, and what I said, are not the same as what you’re accusing me of saying. Writing books isn’t stupid - as long as you realize that if you’re expecting to make a profit from it, you’d better make sure someone is willing to pay you for it first.
It’s stupid in the universe we both inhabit, which (in case you’ve been living under a rock) is a universe where copyright law is essentially unenforceable, and where millions of people break it every day. Wag your finger at them all you want; the fact is they do it, you can’t stop them from doing it, and you’re living in a fantasy world if you pretend they don’t exist.
Yes, and it works just fine for manufacturing industries, because it’s possible to keep a manufactured product in your possession until someone buys it. That obviously doesn’t work with information. You can’t keep one person from whispering a number in his friend’s ear.
They collect the money from you before they give you the pills, that’s for sure.
Ridiculous. They may not wait for the money to enter their hand, but they do find a customer and quote a price, and there’s an expectation that the customer will pay it.
On my own? Of course not. What an irrelevant question - either you really don’t understand what I’ve proposed, or you’re just trying your damnedest to appear ignorant.
Let’s say there’s a movie that costs 10 million dollars to make, and let’s say there are 10 million people who want to see it. You only have to collect one dollar from each of them to break even. See how that works? It’s simple multiplication. And in fact, you can see it in action today - a movie might cost $10 million to make, but the individual tickets cost far less than that, because the studio expects to sell many tickets. The only difference is they collect the money after they’ve already done the work, so they’re taking the risk that they won’t sell enough tickets to recoup the cost of producing the movie.
Writing music. Playing an instrument. Writing dialogue, correcting spelling and grammar. Editing film. The only steps in making a movie that might be considered “making a product” are printing the film and burning/pressing DVDs.
Everything that doesn’t result in a discrete unit of a physical product is a service industry. Hint: If you don’t need to obtain any more materials or perform any more labor to supply copies of your “product” to 1000 people than to supply one person, you’re not manufacturing a product at all.
What a revelation! Thank god I didn’t suggest anything of the sort.
Mr2001, we’re accumulating a lot of unnecessary crap as we go along, so I’m going to limit my responses to things that seem germaine to the topic at hand.
But you don’t pay before they do the research, testing, gaining of goverment approval, construction of manufacturing facilities, actual manufacture, or packaging, do you? Wether criminals can copy the material or not, the issue at hand is the fact that nobody charges before development of a product for a mass audience, because it would be insane to do so. The logistics alone would be nightmarish.
I, and you, are talking about selling things to the consumer. People don’t find customers and quote prices before designing a line of chairs for mass production; the only time this occurs is when the item is being purchased for and by a single person. Which is not what either of us is talking about.
Okay. I’m a movie studio. I send you an email asking you to send me one dollar, and in return in two or three years from now I’ll give you a copy of this movie I’m going to make. I can’t tell you much about, see, since it hasn’t been made yet; we only have the first rough draft and you know how those change. There’s certainly no reviews or anything like that. Oh, and if you don’t pay, you can just bum a copy off that friend of yours who got it off of bittorrent. Do you want to pay up? Me and the other studios will be sending you about two emails like this a week, begging for scraps. How many movies do you think will get made?
As I’ve said: the ‘business model’ you’re proposing is completely infeasible. Unless you can think of some alternative that will actually work, we’re be stuck with the fact that persons who illegally copy movies do in fact undermine (though not yet destroy) the current business model used to make movies, and therefore those who illegally copy movies are actively opposing the creation of movies!
Don’t worry though; there are still enough of us non-criminals to support the criminals for a while longer, I think. Probably even long enough for technology to be developed to stop the freeloaders from doing any damage. (IE: better copy protection.) So, the possible demise of moviemaking remains a theoretical, and only has weight in moral arguments and the like.
All this is is a ridiculous redefinition of ‘service’ to mean ‘something I can copy in my home with little effort’. By this definition, hairdressers and waiters make products now! (Labor is expended.) I of course reject this mis-definition.
If you want to debate that all information should be available for free, and that that’s the only reason you think that illegally copying movies is moral, than you are free to argue that position, but please do so directly. These sidetracks aren’t helping anybody.
Whether they actually collect the money beforehand is beside the point. They do enough market research to know that people will buy their product, and more importantly, the product they end up with is one that they can charge people for realistically. If their market research turns out to be wrong, and they can’t sell enough pills to make back the money they spent making them, at least they still have the pills, and they’re worth something.
Sure, depending on whether you can interest me in the movie you plan to make, what guarantees I’ll have in case the movie doesn’t get made or doesn’t turn out to be the same as you described, etc. Do you really think I haven’t thought this far? Do you think I’d propose something I was unwilling to participate in myself?
As for bumming a copy off that friend of mine… sure, I can do that, if it gets made. If I don’t care whether it gets made, maybe I’ll hang on to my dollar and hope that it eventually comes out and I can see it for free. If it doesn’t get made, no big deal. But if I do care, if it’s a movie that catches my attention and I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get to see it, then I’m going to pay because I want it to be made.
If you believe that, I have a bridge in New York to sell you. Anyone who’s devoted serious thought to the issue knows how unrealistic that expectation is.
You can’t make bits uncopyable any more than you can make water unwet, and even the toughest, most sophisticated DRM scheme–which, although still crackable, might make digital copying too tedious to be worth it–can’t change the fact that movies have to be presented to human eyes and ears, which means they can be captured by video cameras and microphones (the “analog hole”). Thousands of people share and download bootleg copies of movies that were recorded with camcorders in noisy theaters; the inability to make a perfect digital copy doesn’t really matter to them.
Ah, I forgot about your trouble with the language. Sorry for the confusion. I should’ve said Everything that doesn’t result in a discrete unit of a physical product is a service industry, and so are some other industries.
Hairdressers perform a service just as writers do (and just as other people also perform services - let me know if you need me to keep explaining that). Giving two haircuts takes twice as much labor as giving one haircut, just as writing two scripts takes twice as much labor as writing one script. That doesn’t mean a haircut or a script–the information that makes up a script, as opposed to the paper it’s written on–is a product. A consultant who says “Barbie should be 12 inches tall and have removable shoes” is adding value to Barbie dolls and expending labor by providing this information, but she’s still performing a service, just like the writer who says “this character should come into the room, deliver these lines, pick up the hatchet, and leave”.
I suppose I’m only making it worse by adding my snarky tips to the wrong sentence. Let’s try If you don’t need to obtain any more materials or perform any more labor to supply copies of your “product” to 1000 people than to supply one person, you’re not manufacturing a product at all; you still might not be manufacturing a product even if you do need to perform more labor.
Point is, you’re making the fallacy of jumping from “if A then B” to “if not A then not B”.
This means that each movie will only be funded by people who care passionately about it. That hard-core fan base is a much, much smaller than the current mass-market movie audience. I doubt you could find 10,000 people – forget 10 million – who are excited enough about ANY movie project to fund it up front.
Have you ever worked in any part of the entertainment industry? Because you really don’t seem to have a very solid grasp on how these sorts of projects get funded … .
I suspect that if copyright went away the movie industry could adapt, but it would need a very different business model than what you propose. New movies would be theatrical release only and the studios would implement very tight controls on the physical media itself, maybe to the point of having full-time armed guards accompany each print wherever it travels. Theater ushers would return to keep tabs on audiences to eject anyone who attempted to record a movie while it was being shown. The home DVD market would consist entirely of dirt-cheap copies of older movies – no new releases. Big-budget blockbusters would go away – without the possibility of additional revenue from TV and DVD releases those $100 million plus budgets wouldn’t be sustainable. So most new films would be small-budget character pieces – great if you love My Big Fat Greek Wedding, not so great if you love Star Wars. A lack of copyright wouldn’t kill movies outright, but it would turn them into something quite different from what we experience now.
There would be similar effect in other entertainment industries. The videogame industry would revert to the old arcade business model. Musicians would probably focus mostly on concert performances and only release “teaser” material on radio or CD. And so on.
Basically if you eliminate copyright the only way entertainment creators will be able to recoup their investment is to release their content exclusively in controlled-access venues. This does not seem like a win for consumers.
Finally, a criticism with some merit. All I can say is I don’t think it’ll be hard to convince people to part with a few bucks, particularly if you have the right venue for finding them, you can give them feedback about the fundraising and production process, and you can assure them their money won’t go to waste if the project gets canned.
I guess we’ll all see whether that turns out to be true. 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. Maybe it’s just the northwest frontier spirit, but I’ve never met a single person (IRL) who’s been discouraged from copying or downloading anything just because it’s illegal. As the kids who’ve grown up with internet access become adults, those people are going to get harder and harder to find, and the industry is going to have to deal with it somehow.
Wether the money is collected in advance is the point; you’re proposing (or previously proposed, or seemed to previously propose via enthusiastic and unclear wording) a business model for moviemaking that requires sales in advance of the development of a product meant for mass consumption, and I continue to claim that no existing business uses such a business model. I don’t find it surprising that nobody does either; I find the idea of trying to charge millions of people for an unformed idea two years in advance ridiculous, and I’m shocked that you think otherwise.
Honestly? I don’t think you’ve thought about it, beyond ‘1,000,000 people * $1 per person = $1,000,000’. Let’s take a moment and actually think about this.
(We’re going to pretend for the moment that the masses of people are willing to prebuy all their tickets two or three years in advance. Ha.)
As noted, your proposal is that the capital be accumulated before the production of the movie is begun; this means that there will be no promotion materials, no reviews, previews, teasers, posters, nothing. These all take money, and are all made some ways into the production process anyway.
Given that there will be no way to coherently promote the movie, we can’t interest you in the movie we plan to make, unless you’re hooked by the vague generalities. So, you’ve just killed the funding for, and production of, all movies that aren’t sure-sells by name alone. Now, there might be more of those than one might expect, if the price is only a couple bucks, rather than the five or ten I’d expect them to ask.
Now let’s talk about those ‘guarantees’ you want. You state two, one of which may actually be viable. With this ‘pay before production’ scheme of yours, the audience is being asked to carry the load that is currently being played by the investors and producers of the movie. If a movie should be abandoned mid-production, I don’t actually know who soaks up the loss. If it currently is the producer and backers who do, then I can’t see the consumers being refunded anything more than the as-yet unspent funds (evenly distributed, of course). If the studio sucks up the loss, then the consumers could reasonably expect to get all their dollar back. I myself don’t know which situation is the case.
The other guarantee you asked for, though, the one in case it doesn’t turn out to be the same as you described, that ain’t gonna happen for a couple of very good reasons. Firstly, the audience doesn’t have that guarantee now. If they go into the movie and it’s entirely unlike they were led to believe in the promotional materials, nobody gets their money back. If they buy the movie the only way they can get their money back is if they return it demonstrably unwatched. You see, what you buy is the opportunity to watch the movie, either once at theatre rates, or repeatedly and with a few friends if you buy the DVD. If you watch the movie, then you’ve got what you paid for, even if it sucked to high heaven. That’s the way it works.
The reason it works that way is to protect the moviemakers from reason two: if people could say they hated the movie and get their money back, they would be tempted to do so even if they actually liked it. This goes x10 for the society of theives that you claim the world is: morality and legality be hanged if you can save a buck or two. Movies would promptly stop being made, because everybody would demand their money back from the few movies that got made at all. Some of them might actually think that they didn’t get what they paid for; many more would just be abusing the system.
So, I can’t make any real effort to interest you in the movie I plan to make, and I can’t even guarantee that the movie will get made or turn out to be the same as I (vaguely) described. Are you still willing to pony up, two years in advance? Do you think most discerning consumers will?
You really like to make grand and loud claims, as though that gives them validity, huh? Your attempt to imply that all serious thinkers share your opinion are noted and scoffed at.
If manufacturers wanted to get entirely serious about deterring illicit copying of movies, here is one approach they could take:
Create a new media format for their movies. Stop releasing movies on any other format.
Include in the new format some enhancement to the movie, like 10.2 channel sound or increased color depth or whatever. For this format, make new viewing hardware. Create new cables for the transmission of the new format; nothing in the system will be backwards compatible with old video hardware.
Do not release any other hardware that can read the new media; especially not computer hardware.
This may sound far-fetched, but it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility. And it’ll take more than some adolescent hack with a computer to yank the data out of there.
Oh, and nobody serious cares about analog copying; what could you possibly be thinking bringing it up? Are you going to start screaming about how VCRs are going to be the end of the movie industry now?
Ah, the glorious irony. Perhaps you’ll now recognise that the problem isn’t me, and do one or both of the following:
stop blaming me for when your crappy phrasing garbles up whatever point you’re trying to make, and
give your posts a glance through before posting to make sure that they bear some resemblance to what you’re trying to say.
It’d be far easier to take you seriously if you did one or both of the above.
Anyway, I still don’t see any reason to take your silly redefinition of the terms ‘service industry’ and ‘product’ at all seriously. I mean, look at this:
“Let’s try If you don’t need to obtain any more materials or perform any more labor to supply copies of your “product” to 1000 people than to supply one person, you’re not manufacturing a product at all; you still might not be manufacturing a product even if you do need to perform more labor.”
Quit being such a hack and just say it plainly: you’re trying to redefine ‘product’ to mean “if I can rip it off without working too hard, it’s as a result of my ability to rip it off redefined not to be a product, so I’m somehow justified in stealing it”.
On preview, one final note: amazingly enough, I’m hard pressed to think of an adult who condoned or participated in the illegal copying of movies. I freely concede that the newer generation, though, might be as a whole ambivalent about such things, and it will be interesting to see how the movie industry reacts, if the problem is truly all that widespread across the youth. Time will tell.
Dude, if this funding model worked we’d be using it ALREADY! I’ve been making videogames professionally for ten years. Believe me, if we could defray development costs by getting money up front we would. But nobody will buy a pig in a poke. It’s hard enough to find INVESTORS who expect to make a profit on the deal. Good luck finding people to give you money purely out of their ideological commitment to a copyright-free world!
If the problem gets serious enough, the content and hardware manufacturers will simply come up with new copy-protection schemes that are JUST ENOUGH of a pain in the ass to dissuade the casual copiers.
Maybe every major video/audio player for the PC and Mac will do some sort of ownership check before it will play a file. Maybe every downloaded movie will have a unique ID encoded in every frame allowing the copyright owner to track where the copies originated. Maybe next gen MP3 players will require you to register your name with a central database. Who knows? Sure, the hackers and geeks will always have the tools to by-pass the protection, but for the average guy the hassle of by-passing it will be more trouble than just paying the nominal usage fee. The point is that if unauthorized copying gets bad enough, it’s in the interest of the hardware manufacturers to put a stop to it. Otherwise they’re slitting their own throats. Not to mention the fact that many of the major hardware manufacturers also own content creation companies.
That’s a whole lot more plausible scenario than the entire movie, videogame and music industries totally rebuilding themselves from the ground up on an entirely new and bizarre business model.
Noted. That’s no reason they shouldn’t have that guarantee in the future if they’re going to be paying for a service.
Which is why it would be helpful for the paying customers to have opportunities to provide feedback during the production process, so they can collectively keep an eye on the project they’re paying for.
That’s your judgment, not mine.
Nope, they’ll turn to some enterprising movie maker who does interest them and make promises he can keep.
When it comes to the fundamental nature of information, there is no serious debate. You can’t keep people from sharing information. You can’t make bits uncopyable. Every DRM scheme is fundamentally flawed, not in the “it looks good on paper but just doesn’t seem work in the real world” sense, but in the “are you high? this can’t possibly work!” sense. DRM essentially boils down to giving people a locked box and the key to open it, and hoping they never actually put the key in the lock except under your favored circumstances.
That’s right, it’ll take a hacker with some electronics skill to tap directly into the hardware. Not much of an improvement, because there only has to be one person in the entire world with the skill and motivation to do so. And even if you happen to rig the player with explosives, so the one person in the world with enough skill is blown to bits moments before he finishes ripping Mission Impossible 12, his neighbor can just get out the old video camera - see below.
No, the industry shouted that enough on their own at the time.
You may be right that no one in the industry is concerned about analog copying, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be. If it becomes impossible to make digital copies of the original disc, someone will make a single digital->analog->digital copy in his living room, then digitally copy that.
Like I said, they already do it with new release movies - someone who just wants to see Star Wars for free doesn’t mind that the picture is skewed, the sound is muddy, and there are silhouettes at the bottom of the frame. You can make a much better copy than that at home, where you have time to prepare.
Nope, there’s no such thing as “stealing” a number. My ability to make copies of information without working too hard is simply a consequence of the fundamental nature of information. I’m defining “product” as something that must be made and sold in discrete unit - property that can’t be possessed by two people in two different places at the same time.
If you want to use the word “product” to mean “anything that results from human effort”, then I can’t stop you, but in that case you’d be the one claiming that waiters and hairdressers create a product.
Interesting. Nearly everyone I know who illegally copies music, movies, and TV shows is an adult; a few of them are near retirement age.
Thing is, he won’t have to bypass it. Someone else just has to bypass it once, and then upload the data to the internet where anyone can get it with little effort. That’s how it already works with PC games, for example - Joe User doesn’t have the skill to break every new copy protection scheme the day it comes out, but all it takes is one anonymous hacker on the other side of the earth who can, and then everyone else can reap the rewards instantly.
The only solution would be to use a copy protection scheme that’s theoretically unbreakable, but that’s a contradiction in terms: you can’t give someone a locked box and the key and then expect to control when they open it. Well, actually, there might be another solution: require all new computers to run only operating systems and apps signed by the government, forcibly confiscate all old computers and imports, and devote as much money to snooping out illegal electronics labs as we already devote to snooping out meth labs. I don’t know if you really want to get into that.
The only successful copy protection schemes I know of are for online games, where your license key needs to be verified every time you play online - but they still can’t do a thing about people who copy the game to play it offline.
Heh, what do you think drove the success of MP3 players in the first place?
Prowling around cracked software sites is a pain in the ass. I could also drive over to Chinatown and buy cheap bootlegged DVDs if I wanted to. But I’d rather spend the extra money to get a legit copy at a local store and avoid all the hassle. Most people feel the same way.
The movie companies don’t need to create a perfect security system. They just need to make getting cracked copies a big enough pain in the ass that most people won’t bother.
And yet, amazingly enough, the PC game market is still chugging healthily along! Because the average consumer doesn’t want to go through all the trouble and risk of getting cracked software.
LOL. All it would take is for Microsoft to build an automated license server into a future version of Windows that would check software licenses as it automatically downloaded updates. Sure, it would be trivial for a hacker to bypass, but how many non-geeks are going to hack their OS?
I know what you’re going to say: All they have to do is download an .exe written by a hacker to do the work for them. But how many people are going to run an .exe written by some anonymous high school student that will do God-knows-what to their OS? Would YOU run such a program?
If my parents can figure out eMule, I don’t think the average person will have much trouble using a torrent site/client, if they have the motivation to do so. And of course, we were originally just talking about movies, which (along with music and TV shows) are easier to find and far less risky than cracked software.
Sure, but nothing they do to the actual discs can have that effect. They have to go after the middlemen–torrent site operators and software developers–who make information easily available to the people who want it, but that pesky Betamax decision and First Amendment get in the way of many attempts.
I don’t believe that could be effectively implemented without putting an end to free software, and although MS might not have a problem with that, I don’t think they have a reason to do it at all. It’s a bigger task than it might seem at first thought, and it provides no value to customers or OEMs, only to third party software companies. How is Windows going to know which programs on the computer need licenses, and where to validate them? What happens when your PC doesn’t have an internet connection, or when the software maker goes out of business?
There was an unofficial patch for a major security hole in Windows recently, and I installed it. I don’t know how many other people did, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. If the alternative to installing this new patch was letting companies disable my software remotely, I’d be willing to take that risk as well.
Sooo… the difference between lifting a CD from a record store and downloading it over P2P is that the CD is made of atoms?
Before answering, note that the cost of a blank CD-R is well under $1. Those atoms are pretty cheap. Why do the discs with music on them cost so much more?
Yup. When you take those atoms and hide them in your pocket, they aren’t on the store shelf anymore, so they can’t be sold to another customer or returned for a refund.
Because the manufacturer of those discs has been granted a legal monopoly on selling discs with that particular information on them. In a free market, since the information is available to everyone and therefore identical discs can be created by anyone with a CD burner, competition would drive the price down to slightly more than the blank discs.
