Nobody is disputing that. We are just saying that the current system doesn’t work. Can’t work. Won’t work in the future.
People will keep downloading music, and movies, and games. And the more time pass, the easier it will be, and the more natural it will seem to everybody. At some point, people who’ve been getting music for free just by clicking on a button since they were 6 y.o. won’t even understand anymore what you’re talking about.
Listen : I don’t download anything without paying (even though I’ve been listening to music for free on youtube for several months now). I thought for a long time that downloading music was wrong. But now, I’m fully convinced that it doesn’t even matter the slightest bit whether it is wrong or not because anyway everybody is going to do it.
Discussing whether it should be called theft or not, whether it’s moral or not, whether it would be better if people didn’t download music or not, at this point, is purely academic.
The current system is broken beyond repair. It can’t be enforced, given the technology available. People will download music, even if you don’t like it.
Insisting on arguing against file sharing is just “Donquijoting”. You’re fighting windmills.
Another solution has to be found because the one we used just can’t work any more.
Then there is what the Spanish call a “big problemo”.
Imagine if I had an infinite supply of Ferraris. In fact, everyone I sell a Ferrari to also has the capacity to produce an infinite supply of Ferraris, but it is illegal for him to do so (even suppose that this is rigorously enforced). However, they can acquire licenses to allow them to also sell Ferraris. If the cost in materials of a Ferrari is $0.00 and there is competition (even if there are only a few people who have acquired these Ferrari licenses), how long do you think Ferraris are going to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Sure, the government can mandate that a Ferrari sells for $100,000, minimum, but how many Ferrari makers can they watch 24/7?
That, really, is the problem. The real market price of music is nil. The government is trying to artificially raise the price of music (for a noble end, I admit: for artists to make money). If you look at any example of government-mandated prices being used as policy, they always come with black markets if people can get a good enough deal comparatively. This is true even for things that are scarce. We not only have no realistic way to enforce this, but even if there were, people would still circumvent it (perhaps by bribing or intimidating the copyright officials, like has happened in the past when governments have tried to artificially raise prices). Also, when you start intruding into people’s lives and inconveniencing them, you tend to alienate them, and any sympathy you might have had is lost. So *more *people want to download music than did when you started.
So this economic system, as a means of limiting the copies made of music by those possessing a copy, is broken. Wishing it were not broken or trying to go after those filthy troublemakers has never worked, even once. I don’t know what the alternative needs to be, but one will arise, be it better or worse than the steadily sinking old way.
Most of the arguments I’m seeing here seem to be based upon the assumption that without record sales, artists would have no income at all. That struck me as fallacious in the face of the price of concert tickets. So I went out to google to try to find some numbers stating the relative sources of income for artists. Unfortunately, I found nothing that spelled out dollar amounts or even percentages, but I did find this which appears to list income and expenses from largest to smallest. And live performances tops the list of income.
Live performances simply cannot be pirated and people will pay to see groups they like. And pay through the nose. I know. I’ve bought tickets.
I’ll continue to look to see if I can find numbers, but I don’t see that artists are going to starve if they never sold another CD so long as they’re on stage.
And for the most part, if they’re not on stage, they’re in the bargain bin.
To put this in other terms: I don’t like alcohol. I think the world would be a better place without it. Is this ever going to happen?
I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Trying to enforce copyright is like trying to enforce Prohibition where everyone not only has a still in his bathtub, but an infinite amount of stills.
Yes, this too. People *like *going to see artists they enjoy. They are willing to pay lots of money for it. They are not willing to have a fat guy who lives in his basement go up on stage and sing instead. So naturally, when we invent androids, people will complain about “performance infringement”.
Well yes, there are certain kinds of works where you can make money on side ventures. What about TV shows? What about movies? How are you going to make money doing those, merchandising?
Yes, and that’s the problem. Left to itself, the price for music/movies/TV shows in the market will be 0, and at that price, no one will produce it. This is a market failure. Now, you might disagree with this, but I believe that one of the primary functions of government is to correct market failure. And so the government introduces artificial scarcity into the market so that the market can actually work again.
Absolutely. And it should. The current method however, as others have said repeatedly, isn’t the answer. Will work after pigs start flying. Find another method. No, I don’t know what it is.
Well the point of copyrights is, of course, to encourage the creation of new art/science. Long copyrights don’t do that, no artist is thinking about the profit they might make 40 years from now when they create their thing. So there’s just no reason to have long copyrights.
The downsides are fairly obvious, chiefly that people cannot expand upon art/science that is still protected. Virtually all art and science is based upon previous innovations. This chilling effect is most obvious with patented stuff of course. Imagine if drugs had 150 year protection? The pace of innovation would be positively glacial. Of course, they need some protection, as incentive to create in the first place, but you surely cannot argue that less art would be created if the length of copyright were reduced from 150 years or whatever it is to, say 100 years? I don’t know what the ideal length is, but it is certainly far lower than the current one.
In some cases, music being the obvious one, this is moot of course. Because copyright in that case is utterly ineffectual, even when people infringe for commercial benefit (see: Timbaland), the hordes of lawyers protect them. And of course stopping personal use is impossible.
In other cases it is still important however, patents in computer science for example have not been very successful at all, due to the pace of development. 20 years in that area may as well be forever.
This sort of thing is simply impossible. The issue is twofold. Firstly, you cannot determine if information is being illegally transferred (all information is copyrighted automatically…). It could be a legal transfer, Linux say. Second, even if they could determine it, filesharing will simply become encrypted. Good luck figuring it out then.
Computers already have unique identifiers (MAC addresses, for example). There are ways around them, unsurprisingly. I’m not sure residents of China would be thrilled if a foolproof way were discovered to do this. I doubt one will be though, so whatever.
Because the law is rigorously enforced and the sellers are required to acquire a license (from the ip owner), then the cost is no longer zero. If the license specifies a % of each sale it won’t even trend to zero, if it’s a one time fee it will trend to zero but that was a choice the ip seller made.
I don’t really have a problem with reasonable limits on copyright. As I said, gut feel says 20 years.
I have a real problem with patents, especially in software because myself and a zillion other people are creating and re-creating daily the crap that is getting patented. Although there are probably some quality patents in the compression and crypto realm.
Yeah, something like that. It’s certainly absolutely absurd that Disney still makes money off Mickey bloody Mouse.
It’s not all bad certainly, but there are real problems. Don’t even get me started on submarine patents…
I don’t really understand why there is such a reluctance to try to improve upon IP laws. They were created so long ago, technology has completely changed the landscape since, it’s quite reasonable to take another look at it and see how it can be improved.
Yeah, I rather am. She essentially won the copyright lottery, and has controlled a rather good copyright for 40 or 50 years now. She wrote a good book, and I’m not knocking that achievement, but then she sat on her duff, doing nothing else creative. She would have made plenty of money with a 5 year copyright, and then would have gone on to make more books if more income was needed, you know, like a job.
See, while of course copyright laws weren’t written with todays technology in mind, neither were they written with todays mass media culture in mind. Back then, a copyrighted work would sell to thousands. Now, media can reach millions, or more.
I understand that most copyright holders don’t make nearly so much money, but quite frankly, they still don’t get much sympathy from me. I go to work every day, do my job, and get paid for it. I don’t expect to get paid for doing that single job for life plus 50 years, nor do I hold exclusive rights to that job for the same period. I find it boggling that people whos jobs involve such things do get these protections due to the nature of their job, and not particularly because their achievements are any more noteworthy in many cases. They are just easily distributable to a mass audience.
So basically, no. I agree with the idea behind copyrights, making sure people get adequately compensated for their work, I think that the adequate compensation bit has been taken far to far. Patents do just fine with 20 years, though I feel even that is too long for copyrights, since most is rendered worthless within 5 years anyway.
Will this ever happen? Of course not. Theres far to much money in copyrights to give those protections up. But a guy can dream.
No, it isn’t fundamentally different. You’re taking something that isn’t yours without permission and depriving the owner of value (whether it be a solid object, money, licensing rights, or whatever).
That’s simply not so. Advances in printing press technology led to people publishing books by authors they didn’t have the rights to. In fact it’s where copyright laws came from. Even people a few centuries back realized taking someone else’s work was theft. Too bad so many selfish people these days convince themselves otherwise.
The way I look at it, music is going to go the same way as dance.
Dance is a good form of entertainment, and creative dancers with new styles contribute something to society. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t lend itself well to copyright protection (although yes, I know it’s technically possible to copyright a dance). To make money from dance, you need to do it through personal live performances.
Heck, now that I think about it, there are lots of creative works that contribute a great deal to society but can’t readily be copyrighted. Big deal: now the music industry is in the same boat as lots of other art forms.
Final thought though: the way the music industry and now the film industry have handled piracy has certainly not helped. From the get go, they should have embraced a different model where they make less money per purchase but encourage people to download lots of music / films.
Instead, they’ve tried to do business as usual, supported by crippling DRM, and they are indirectly responsible for turning many people to the torrent side.
And that is is where you go wrong. People produce art for many reasons; to make money off of it is just one motivation (and often not the most important one). Creation of art isn’t going to stop if it ceases to be a money-making venture. What probably will change is the idea that a person ought to be able to make a full-time living off of art production. We might be heading toward a world where most art is produced by amateurs who work at it simply because they enjoy it as a hobby, and where the only artists who can support themselves off of their work are ones who give public performances, such as stage musicians, theater actors, and dancers (because the experience of attending a live performance can’t be copied). It would be a different world from the one we’re currently living in, but not necessarily an inferior one.
Probably the people complaining about them do so for reasons that are ignorant and would cause far more problems than any alleged problems with keeping things the way they are.
Hell, the biggest problem with current IP laws is that they aren’t enforced often and severely enough to scare the people who violate them into flying straight.
