Why not?
I don’t see a problem with copyright of a book because the chances of someone else independently creating that same exact book is almost zero. And therefore I don’t really see a problem with long copyrights either (although, for some emotional reason, my gut says no more than 20 years).
I agree that there is currently very little prospect for changing copyright law, mostly because there are lots of very wealthy powerful corporations who believe they have a vested interest in keeping the current law.
I’m looking ahead.
My advocacy for changing copyright law is not based on greed, and I wish you’d stop saying so. After all I could, if I wanted to, download any damn thing I want RIGHT NOW. Nothing is stopping me. So therefore, if I were a greedy bastard who just wanted free music and movies, why should I care what the law says? Why should I advocate for a change in the law when I can get anything I want for free today? The law isn’t unenforceable because Discordia choses to violate it. It’s unenforceable because when Discordia does violate it nothing bad happens to him. And even if you convince Discordia not to violate the law, there are still hundreds of millions of people left to convince, including people in India and China.
And this is the point. It’s already available for free. And your notion that we’ll come up with a foolproof method of finding and punishing copyright violators is just whistling dixie. It’s not going to happen, and even if it did, you’d have to actually prosecute the kids doing it and somehow convince them that it’s a serious crime. But they won’t believe you, because it sure doesn’t SEEM like a serious crime any more than smoking pot or underage drinking or driving over the speed limit.
It’s an uphill battle to convince people of something when it is in their selfish interest not to be convinced.
And so we try to imagine the future. Ten, twenty years down the road. When hard drive storage is even cheaper. When wireless high speed networking is even more ubiquitious. When devices more powerful than today’s iPods are so cheap they are given out in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal.
What’s going to be happening in the future? Sure, some people in rich countries who have a certain moral code will refuse to watch pirated movies and TV shows and listen to pirated music. But most people won’t care, especially in third world countries. And even for the people who DO care and refuse to violate copyright out of principle, there will be lots and lots and lots of free material available. I can watch any South Park episode I like today, all without violating copyright or downloading some mystery file. I just go to southparkstudios.com and they’ve got every episode archived there, all completely legal.
And so even under our current copyright regime, the future is that every user will gravitate towards content that is free. That content will either be free because the creator gave it away for free for some reason, or because it was pirated. So how in hell do creators get compensated for their work? If they depend on consumers paying them a fee before they can access the content, they won’t. Oh, they can offer such content for sale, but that business model won’t work. And so they’ve got to figure out different ways of making money. Running ads maybe, that’s how radio stations and weekly newspapers make money by giving out free content. Or subscription models, or Og knows what. But it isn’t going to look much of anything like today’s model, because that model is dead as the dodo, you just don’t know it because the dodo is still flapping its wings and running around. But anyone who pays attention can see that the dodo’s head has been chopped off, and the odds for sewing the head back on don’t look very good.
As broadband gets cheaper and more widespread, and computers get fast, I could foresee a model where ISPs enforce digital filesharing for a slice of the market share. Pay the ISP network 20% and they’ll filter out packets known to contain bits of copyrighted material; they’ll refuse to carry unidentified packets. I could also foresee a computer system where every CPU has a unique encoded identifier to better track computer usage — after all, cars have license plates and citizens have SSNs, why not computers?
The whole business of corporate publishing is fairly doomed, though, I agree.
from Lemur
The government does indeed put people in jail for illegal drug use.
The government does indeed put people in jail for certain traffic violations.
People can justify anthing that benefits themselves. It is then up to society and the law to convince them otherwise.
I totally agree with you on that. The key words being SELFISH INTEREST. I have said from the start, that this is somebody saying “I want it - I can get it - and I don’t want to pay for it”. Selfish is the key word yes indeedy or as Sarah Palin says “youbetcha”.
You keep bringing up this point as if it means something. Yes, people who download pirated material are greedy bastards. What are you going to DO about it? Do you have some plan to change human nature?
As I said earlier, if you could rely on altruism you wouldn’t need to try to stop people from downloading pirated material, you could just ask them to send the creator a check every time they do. But people aren’t that altruistic, they’d rather get things for free. So now what? People are greedy, and free stuff is available everywhere with zero risk of punishment. What’s gonna happen? Most will take the free stuff. How do you stop them? It’s one thing to shed bitter tears about the fallen state of humanity, it’s another to do something about it.
Lemur.
Okay - I was trying to be polite and show some signs of mature restraint. But you keep pushing so here it is:
I have read threads just like this one on a large variety of message boards for many years now. People have all kinds of fancy verbage and engage in Olympic worthy mental gynmastics to come up with very intellectual and quite worth arguments in favor of allowing them to do what they want to do. I admire the creativity of the human animal. “you can’t steal if you have not deprived the holder of anything tangible or real”. Yeah ---- right.
But it is all intellectual masturbation. Its all selfish greed. Its all very self centered. Its all asking for a license to steal.
You keep asking me what I would do about this.
This is what I do about this. I talk to you as an intelligent person. I try to appeal to you as a person. One on one - you and I.
I am not the king. I do what I can do.
Thank you for your efforts. And there are plenty of other people like you who are trying to get everyone to see that piracy is bad. The only problem is that it doesn’t seem to be working.
And lest you get the idea that I constantly pirate things myself, there’s not much incentive for that because although I don’t spend much money buying CDs any more (except from local acts that I see live), I can listen to pretty much any music I like without pirating anything. I can order any CD or movie I like from my public library. I can go to Youtube. I can go to accuradio or pandora.
Now, why should I buy a back catalog song from the store, or even from iTunes when I can listen to that same song anytime I like on Youtube? I’m not violating the law, I’m not pirating anything, yet the creator gets nothing. And I don’t like this state of affairs because although I don’t like to spend money when I don’t have to I want creators to be paid.
Well, what about this? Let’s say that there is a certain song I would like to listen to. If I download it illegally off of Youtube, I will burn it on a CD and play it in my vehicle.
The legal alternative is to pay $11.95 for the CD at the record store. Even if this was 1988, I wouldn’t pay money for the recording. I like the song, but wouldn’t buy it.
What is the author of this song being denied if I download it? I wasn’t going to pay for it anyways. The artist still and would have gotten zero money from me, only now I am listening to his song. Does the fact that I am listening to his song hurt him physically, emotionally, or financially? Why should he have a redress against me when he has no real damages?
Financially: yes.
Or are you truly arguing scarcity of resources has no impact on economic transactions?
I wasn’t buying the CD anyways. He wasn’t getting money from me. He doesn’t suffer financially.
There is no scarcity of resources if we are talking about electronic copies of a song. I can make a hundred of them in the next 10 minutes. There is no scarcity of copies.
You do know that Hayek won the Nobel prize in economics, right?
As for file sharing, let me ask a few questions to those of you who think intellectual property rights should be abolished:
The arguments I’ve heard in favor of file sharing center around the existence of file sharing as an advertising mechanism for the artists - everyone shares the songs, the artist becomes popular, and therefore makes more money on the concert circuit, or selling T-shirts and CD’s on a web site, or maybe by selling his songs to other artists and for use in movies and TV and such.
But all of this depends on the artist retaining his intellectual property rights. In other words, people who advocate file sharing want the author to give up IP rights, but only with respect to the person who wants free music.
If intellectual property and copyright don’t exist at all, and eveything is just part of the commons, these other paths to income for artists also dry up. And why would anyone ever make a TV show or a movie again? These cost millions of dollars to make, and no theater would pay to air them, because they’d just copy the prints and show them without compensation to the creator.
There would still be art in this future, but it would be low-budget, Youtube-ish art. Art that requires significant investment by professionals would no longer be done. It would all be amateur art. Textbooks wouldn’t be made, because again that takes huge capital, and would have no return on investment.
Intellectual property rights are more important now than they ever were, because more of our economy is being driven by intellectual property. Eliminate them, and we’ll all become much, much poorer. You may think that a creative commons is a good idea for everything, but there’s a reason why the commons are usually accompanied by a tragedy.
Sam - Hayek winning the Nobel prize is a fact. Just like the facts that he was not allowed to attend department meetings at the U of Chicago and the fact that the Austrian school is not considered by many other economists as a legitimate school of thought because of their position on the scientfic method to validate their theories.
The fact is that the various disciplinary phases of libertarianism, are all based on axioms as a part of a belief system that is a matter of faith. They have their own language, own definitions of things that differ with others, and their own unique style of arguement and logic.
Just ask a died in the wool libertarian about their defense of the last 20 years of government deregulation of the economy to see the reaction. Just about everybody in the government and in the media knows what deregulation means. Not the libertarians. They have a definition that says there was no deregulation and it never happened.
But that’s a fundamental difference.
I must disagree. If a law is essentially unenforceable, it’s pointless to keep it in the books. If it used to serve an useful purpose, then you have to find another solution to reach this goal.
Otherwise, all you do is saying “our communist system would be fine if only everybody worked hard”, “our way of encouraging arts would work well if only people didn’t download music”, “pigs would fly if only they had wings”.
You really don’t know how you would spend your money if you didn’t illegally copy the music. By getting something for free that you value (you do value it otherwise you would not expend the energy to copy it or to listen to it) you’ve altered your desire to pay for that particular song and most likely to some extent other music as well.
If it was impossible to make illegal copies, do you believe that would have zero impact on the number of sales?
When you make illegal copies you are right there is no scarcity, when you follow the laws we humans made up, there is scarcity. The laws were created for a reason. You may disagree with having to pay $16 for a CD with 1 or 2 good songs (I know I don’t buy CD’s because of that), but it doesn’t change the math formula that says unlimited free copies=fewer paying customers.
Basically, that’s the concept that was implemented over here (and maybe everywhere else, but I wouldn’t know) for tapes, if I’m not mistaken. Since tapes were used to copy music, a special tax on blank tapes has been implemented, the money being redistributed to music producers according to some relatively arbitrary method.
Despite the possibility to artificially inflate the number of clicks, it would be a reasonable approximation in most cases. Even though you couldn’t conceivably track every site where music is available for download/listening. Another problem is that it would have to be implemented at an international level.
There is still no scarcity. iTunes, for example, can distribute an infinite amount of copies of a song; if every human being on earth decided to buy the same Madonna album, they would not be out of copies. There are potentially enough digital Madonna albums for everyone to have 1000 copies of it. Not so with Ferraris, for example.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Within approximately 1 hour you will have people gaming the system. Fred’s automated song player will launch 1,000,000 virtual sessions and each one will play his song every couple minutes.
Suzy combined about 10 different artists songs in her cool video on youtube that everyone is playing, how do account for that? etc. etc.
I don’t know what a better idea is, but I see lots of complications with anything with rules trying to figure out who gets what.
The scarcity exists from the perspective of the purchaser, not the producer.
I’m not advocating abolishing the concept of intellectual property.
It is precisely when the person who wants to use another’s creation to make some sort of money that our current system works well. People making money from someone else’s IP can be tracked back through the chain of commerical transactions. You watch a McDonald’s commerical with your music, your lawyer can call up McDonalds and demand compensation. Same as in the movie. Any time a moneymaking business publicly uses someone else’s work then our current copyright law is easily enforceable. And this is why it used to work, because companies who violated copyright were easy to discover and because they were a moneymaking business they had assets that could be seized to compensate the violated creator.
Corporations don’t routinely violate copyrights or patents because not because they are altruistic, but because it’s too easy to get caught. And companies that would benefit most from violating other people’s IP are almost always companies that have significant IP of their own to protect. Publishers are the ones who would benefit the most from ripping off someone else’s book, software companies would beneift most from ripping off someone else’s software, and so on. But these same companies that would happily rip off everyone else don’t advocate for IP laws to be scrapped because then THEY would be ripped off.
It’s when the copyright violator can trivially create copy for personal use that it doesn’t work. And note that it isn’t the copying of another’s work that was easy to enforce in the above examples, but rather the offering of the copied work for sale. If Random House prints thousand of copies of someone else’s book and then the CEO reads a copy and then orders the whole batch pulped, then the violated publishing house is never going to find out. It’s only when Random House tries to sell the book to the bookstores that they get discovered.
Is it OK to sneak into a movie theater and watch a movie if you weren’t going to watch the movie if you had to pay for it? Is it OK to sneak into an amusement park if you weren’t going to enter the park if you had to pay for it?