But your reply to Estilicon dealt only with how much he has paid to read the books:
You don’t mention permission, you mention profit. The publishers may have made an exemption for libraries, but my question is still the same. How is reading a book online different than reading a book from the library?
Sex with someone without their consent is obvious harm to that person. I don’t think that is an apt analogy for this situation. Is the important part that Estilicon didn’t pay for the book, or is the important part that he didn’t have the consent of the author to read it?
Where? I believe I asked you something about whether you’d like that.
How? If noncommercial copying became mainstream and legal, a lot of artists could possibly lose profits, be forced out of the business, (or go to part time) and a lot of them would be disgusted with the whole situation and that would defnitely affect how they presented their work and did their business. NO ONE would be exempt from having their work “noncommercially copied” and distributed, hither and yon. Perhaps you don’t see any potential loss in income for these artists, but I sure as hell do.
Oh, that’s completely unacceptable.
Oh sure, the shops could all sign “agreements” to not distribute the works, but all you need is one rogue employee, and the genie is out of the bottle, never to go back in again. And how do you think these shops will handle this? Enormous insurance coverage, to protect them from lawsuits that crop up from “leaked” work of their customers? And how would the courts determine the “value” of a leaked, unpublished work of an unknown artist or author, for instance? Perhaps that work was deeply private and the artist didn’t want their personal feelings revealed. How can a court decide “damages” on that kind of thing, and how could any small framing shop, for instance, afford insurance to cover the possibility of lawsuits?
Sure, they could punish the employee who “leaked” the work, but you can’t get money from a dry well. And in the case of film being processed, for instance, it could be years before the artist even knew their photos were swiped, and by that time the culprits are out of business or elsewhere.
It’s an absurd notion. Having to always keep track of each and every person who had access to the work, trying to “prove” that a photo lab swiped the work, when in fact it could have been a dishonest friend or relative—how could they “prove” something so definitively, years after the fact, especially if the work was anonymously distributed on the Internet?
Forget it. It is way too convoluted.
They wouldn’t have to misattribute the work to the original author. They could just not correct any assumptions. Speaking for myself, I don’t necessarily pay attention to who the director or editor is on a film, and if a version of a film said, “Directed by George Lucas and modified by Joe Blow,” I might easily miss it. I daresay a lot of people would.
Hey, I’ve gone for a long time without selling certain works, (not 20 years, but it seemed a long time to me) because I hadn’t found the right “audience” for that kind of work. I’ve had works neglected and ignored in one type of show, only to be treated like the Belle at the Ball at another show. I wasn’t “overpricing” my art, it just took me a while to find the right market. Now, I doubt it’s common to take 20 years to find the right audience, but even a 3, 5, or 10 year lag means that much less time to make money off of the work.
My question is, how bady is society being damaged by being denied access to shit? I don’t think that those eccentric collectors of the absurd and shitty would not claim that less shit in the world has severely “damaged” society, no matter how much they enjoy it.
How can you, indeed? So rather than letting those who want to hang onto their shit longer, while simultaniously allowing those who are “ahead of their time” opportunity to profit off of their innovative work, you would prefer that the shit-collectors get plenty more stuff to collect, and the ahead-of-their-time artists sit back and get very little reward for their remarkable works.
I can be quite prolific (I draw very fast), and I’ve got a lot of Life Drawings that were done in 20 minutes or so. But I think they’re nice, and other people think they’re nice. But I never would want to see them used in anything related to pornography. Bottom line.
I’d prefer to release them to the public, of course, but if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be that much of a sacrifice—I’ve got plenty of other works out there as well. I can’t believe that I’d be the only one who’d cherry-pick through my work and said to myelf, “I saw what some [pornographer/Wayne Newton fan/Star Trek Fan] did with my friend Sophie’s drawings, so forget it. I can just show these other ream of drawings instead.”
You don’t believe that artists would do this? Well, based on my own feelings, and the sentiments of my peers, I think you’re wrong. I also seriously doubt that you are psychic and know how a vast portion of artists would react to seeing their work in the public domain while they are still as young as late 30s. That’s a lot of life left, and every year, more and more of their work would be in the public domain. I don’t think they’d react to that favorably.
I personally don’t care so much if someone uses my art as bird cage lining as long as they pay me, but obviously someone came up with the idea for this law, and I doubt they came up with this law without the encouragement of a lot of artists. The law in Europe is more strict and thorough than in the US (check out France’s version—yikes!) but it exists, and obviously exists for a reason.
So, doesn’t that tell you something about the sentiments in artists’ heads? Some of them apparently are even more sensitive than me (because I don’t mind if someone uses my art for birdcage liner). However, I am sure most artists could agree on one point—bird cage liner or painting moustaches on the faces, whatever—I sure as hell wouldn’t want them to publish the work after they’d done that to it. And fortunately, because of current copyright laws, they can’t. But even seperate of copyright laws, laws such as these “moral rights” laws (especially the laws over in Europe) clearly confirm the sentiment that it’s not OK to mess with the “integrity” of a creative work. Once again, these sentiments didn’t come from a vacuum. I suspect that a significant number of artists encouraged the creation of such laws.
Give me a break. How could someone possibly negotiate a decent price for an unknown’s work, before that unknown’s work has generated any attention or has even been published? On what basis could a person demand a decent price for such works? Hope? Confidence? A crystal ball? That’s rarely how these negotiations work.
I’ve negotiated prices on my work and trust me, no matter how damned good your work is, if you are an “unknown,” they don’t want to pay you as much as a “known” artist. I’ve dealt with this personally. That’s how it is.
It’s a matter of consent, Estilicon. Your basic argument is that by allowing file sharing as a marketing tool, artists may sell more not less of their work.
Fine, if that’s the business model they choose to adopt, good luck to those artists. But if a particular artist makes a choice that it is not going to adopt that method of marketing, and wants to be paid for every copy of their work sold, then who are you to just leach their work anyway?
And as has already been pointed out to you, the fact that you have leached many works but bought only one would give me no confidence (were I an artist) that the file-sharing-as-marketing ploy works anyway.
Money and copyright are intertwined because copyright is an idea designed to help artists make money from their art. Violate copyright and you, almost by definition, harm the artists ability to make a living at their art.
I’d say the most important part is that he didn’t have consent, but that is closely tied with paying since that’s how he would normally get consent. When you go to the library, you get consent a different way. If the writer gave you a copy of the book, you have consent in yet another way. It is the artists copyright to do with what they will.
If it was a good idea, economically, for the publisher to make books available for free online, they probably would. It’s not our place to make that decision for them, it is not our copyright.
OK, I see. So if you are prohibited from copying a commercially available thing and giving it to a friend, that is an infringement of your expressiveness, to use your term. The real issue then: is this a reasonable restraint upon you, given its effects upon the rights of the copyright holder? Which is the substance of this debate. So, let’s get on to that:
Obtusely nitpicking at analogies so as to avoid having to deal with their substance does your credibility as a debater no good, Mr2001.
Take it that I leave enough cash to cover every marginal or potential cost so that the store owner is not inconvenienced: all he misses out on is his profit.
And all his other customers do what I do. And the hardware store owner inevitably goes broke.
Moral or immoral?
Don’t nitpick, answer the substance, even if it hurts. If you can.
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Where do I get the identical hammer and paint bucket from? All this is doing is putting the moral question off.
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Interesting. Earlier, I suggested that an opportunity that allows people to get commercially sold music for nothing damages CD sales and you snorted derisively and said: “Cite?”
But when it comes to buses you say “Of course it would”.
You have some cognitive dissonance to deal with, my boy.
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You’re just filibustering. Either abusing other people’s copyright is immoral or it isn’t. Whether other people do other things that damage potential sales is a whole other question.
No, never said that. Earlier, you said:
And I pointed out that you were quite free to do this as long as you didn’t do it for commercial gain. Expanding this out to pretend that I meant that copying and distributing was not an infringment of copyright is just something you are attributing to me so that you can knock down the strawman.
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As to the hardware store thing, see above. When you deal with the substance of my analogy, instead of nitpicking, we can deal further. As to “without putting anyone out?”, if I had a reasonable chance of selling something to 10 people, but the first person to buy it just copied it to the 9 others against my express wishes, I’d be pretty damn put out, let me tell you.
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That someone had no right to the water (or no more than you). They weren’t the owner of it, they didn’t invent it. Try using a realistic example, or is the whole issue of lost opportunity cost just too hard to deal with? Are you unable to grasp the concept of copyright infringement diminishing the opportunity to the copyright holder, or do you just not like talking about it? Given your vacuous example above, I think probably the latter.
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One day, you may actually win a debate by vigorously asserting the proposition under debate. Today is not that day. Tomorrow is not looking too good either.
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Well now, that’s interesting. “Entitled”. Do you mean morally or legally? Presumably the former, given that (as you pointed out) the legal question is beyond doubt, and would be merely a matter for GQ.
So why is the venue owner morally entitled to decide who can be in the arena? How does it put him out if extra people sneak in? By sneaking in, you would say that they are not “taking” anything, the venue already existed. Indeed, it seems to me that in your moral universe, it is (as you would be quick to assert vigorously if we were discussing copyright owners instead of venue owners) pretty much “impossible” to take anything away from venue owners, except perhaps the opportunity to sell tickets, and we all know how little regard you have for opportunity cost.
So why is the venue owner morally entitled to decide who can be in the arena?
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But anyhow, getting back to my original point, once again, you nitpick to avoid dealing with the substance. Let’s assume the hall was not going to be full. The point is not the moral or legal relationship between the fraudulent concertgoers and the venue. The point is that the band is not going to make any money.
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Interesting. It seems to me that at the crux of your position is a view that morality depends essentially on what consumers can get away with, and what artists can prevent. If you can get away with ripping off people’s music, that is moral. If a musician could do something to avoid you ripping them off, but they don’t, then it is moral to rip them off.
Sort of a jungle morality. If the girl went down a dark alley, raping her is OK because it’s her fault she didn’t have anyone to protect her.
Obviously, we’re starting to just go round and round repeating the same thing, so I’ll limit my comment to this:
Obviously, you restrict access to it – only allow the viewing of the piece, without the benefit of copy machines, cameras, or other methods of reproducing it. Possibly you get prospective purchasers to sign something similar to a NDA. Such processes are not unknown in the business world, and are used fairly regularly to protect sellers courting buyers for property that is easily reproducible, yet for whatever reason falls outside of copyright/trademark/patent protections.
You’re missing the point. Restricting access to the photos isn’t going to change the fact that the artist was an unpublished unknown.
I’ve had some experience with this personally, and I’m just telling you—no one is going to pay a decent price for an unknown’s work. Only if the work were so unique and so extraordinary might they pay something remotely close to what it would end up being worth in the long run. For everything else, (no matter how lovely and fabulous the works are), the negotiations are going to be, “Why should we pay that much for an unpublished unknown’s work?” And the negotiations will get stuck, right there on that point, until the seller settles for a “modest fee,” or the deal is called off.
Immoral again, because you’re taking his time and expecting him to accept cash in exchange. You don’t know what value he places on his own time unless you’ve made an agreement with him, and he’s agreed that he’ll waste X minutes of his time replacing the tools you took if you pay him Y dollars - in which case it would be moral.
That, my friend, is the substance of your analogy. The very thing that makes your hardware store different from file sharing–the fact that the store owner does not have the same things after you left as he did when you came in–is what makes one immoral and the other moral.
Beats me. Maybe you have some kind of 1980’s style “cloning ray” which allows you to duplicate the items, take the originals, and leave an identical copy on the shelf. Maybe you live in the Matrix and you can just copy hammers like a Kazaa user copies songs. You’re trying to draw a parallel to file sharing, right?
The astute reader will not that buses are not the same as music. A CD is not the same as an MP3, and there are various reasons to choose a CD instead of or in addition to an MP3; while rides of the same quality on identical bus routes are, for the riders’ purposes, identical. Notice that I said “unless the passengers had another reason to support the fee-charging bus line”, which may not apply to buses in this case, but it does apply to CDs.
Of course, the actual real-world evidence doesn’t support the theory that file sharing harms music sales. Even if I agree that there’s no reason for someone to pay for a bus ticket instead of getting a free ride… even if, purely for the sake of argument, I were to agree that there’s no reason for anyone to buy a CD when he could get an MP3 for free… the evidence doesn’t change. The Earth has always been round no matter how many people have thought otherwise, and people still buy music no matter how many times you claim they don’t.
Denying your own words already? How pathetic. Let’s see… from page 7 (bolding mine):
If copyright doesn’t give anything more than a monopoly on profiting, then it’s legal for anyone else to copy the work, as long as they don’t make a profit from it. A monopoly on profiting from a song is not a guarantee that people will buy the song.
Sorry, you don’t have a right to have customers. I’m referring to actual harm to the seller - losing something they had, or having to replace something they lost - not the falling through of plans to get rich. A dollar you hope to earn is a dollar you haven’t earned.
I grasp it perfectly well, thank you. I just don’t care. No one has a right to seize every opportunity first, no one has a right to have customers who want to buy your product, and no one has a right to make a buck. If you’re trying to make a living at something unprofitable, get a new job; don’t lobby the government to make it profitable by outlawing competition.
OK, then go ahead and explain how you can “take” a song from me that I wrote, so that you have a song and I have none. This thread could use some humor.
They’re taking away the venue owner’s choice of how to use his scarce resource. Perhaps he wanted to fill the empty seats with friends and family, or send some orphans to their first rock show. Or maybe he just likes looking at empty seats.
The point is, since seats are physical property, either someone’s in the seat or they aren’t - the seat can’t be empty and full at the same time, nor can two customers use the same seat (without interfering with each other). Even if the owner had no plans for using the seats, he retains the right to use them for any purpose at any time, and since he can’t use a seat while someone else is using it, that implies being able to choose who can use it at any given time.
Well, if all you care about is the band making money, why bring fake tickets into the picture? Why not just ask if it’s moral for people to stand out on the sidewalk and listen to the show for free, instead of paying for a ticket?
I think you’d answer that question differently - I sure did. The venue has a right to keep people out, but the band doesn’t have a right to get paid by everyone who hears them play.
Nah. Noncommercial copying is moral no matter how risky or easy it is. It isn’t any less moral to copy a copy-protected CD; it’s just harder.
If you believe (as I do) that fraud is immoral, then it’s immoral to use a counterfeit ticket even if the venue doesn’t employ any counterfeit prevention measures - but if they don’t even try to prevent counterfeits, they’re idiots and it’s harder to feel sorry for them.
For the same reason, it’s immoral for a company to lead an artist to believe that they’ll pay him for the use of his song, then turn around and use it without paying him. It’s not immoral because they’re copying his song against his will, but because they’re defrauding him.
Of course not, but then, you knew that. It’s fun and easy to knock down strawmen, isn’t it?
And now you’re asking if I “prefer” it. What a difference. Next you’ll ask if I would “enjoy” it or “want” it or be “happy” about it.
You didn’t ask me if I thought some artists would lose income, you asked if I would
I think the benefit to society (as consumers and creators of derivative works, not as people trying to sell access to information) of looser copyright laws would outweigh society’s loss of any works those artists might otherwise have sold.
Then you call Lionel Hutz and take Kinko’s to the cleaners.
Of course. Do you think a business like Kinko’s, that makes money by making copies, doesn’t already have some protection against copyright infringement suits?
It should be specified in the contract. I imagine it would be based on the profit that could have been made if all those copies were sold, but that’s something for the parties to work out themselves.
A business that doesn’t take into account the possibility of a lawsuit is a business doomed to fail. They’d afford it the same way they afford any type of insurance: by including it in their prices and taking steps to show their insurer they aren’t much of a risk.
No more convoluted than trying to prove whether an MP3 is legitimate or not. Law is complicated, that’s why lawyers make money.
Then a lot of people are idiots. There’s nothing wrong with writing “Directed by George Lucas and modified by Joe Blow”; it is, in fact, the honest truth, and if people ignore the “modified by Joe Blow” part then they’re just lazy.
Of course, it’s possible to present the honest truth in a dishonest way, in order to mislead the buyer into thinking the film was actually approved by George Lucas, and that would be something for the courts to decide in a particular case.
If they get little reward because people don’t like their work, what do you expect? Why should people buy something they don’t like?
I agree with Dewey that it isn’t unreasonable to expect artists to make something that will actually be useful in the near future, in exchange for whatever limited monopolies we grant them, rather than granting them monopolies reaching far into the future just because their work might someday have an audience.
Let’s cut the crap. Society loses out if artists are too broke to work full time on their art because they can’t afford to. Less art will be produced. These things are all connected.
Let’s cut the crap on this one too.
This idea that you have, that anyone who casts eyes on a work and somehow manages to get a copy made, that they should be legally allowed to “share” this copy, well, this is utter and complete bullshit.
Think about it. Someone’s laptop is stolen, and it has their unfinished memoirs, some digital artwork they never intended to release to the public, Quicktime video of them having sex with their wife—whatever. And it’s on this laptop, and now the laptop is stolen and who knows who the hell has it and yeah, it’s pretty easy to get all that content up on the web. And once it’s up there, it can be legally and freely “shared,” right? No way to stop it. It’s all legal, as long as no profit is made.
Or, some shithead kid secretly scans private writings or artwork (or video) of their parents, uploads it, and that’s it. Or a thief steals a computer and uploads all its contents to the Internet, or someone’s packing box with lots of journals, sketchbooks or video is lost in transit, and on and on.
No way would this remotely work, not without everyone having to treat every bit of even remotely private information about themselves like it was top secret and subject to be “leaked” at any moment. Give it up. This ain’t gonna work, no way, no how.
It still damages the artists’ reputation, and yes, as usual, your typical solution is to get the courts involved in trying to decide what sort of labeling in such a “modified” movie was really clear enough, even to get through to the inattentive dummies.
Not paying attention again, I see. Their work is “remarkable,” which means it does get attention (eventually) and does make plenty of money (eventually). But just not soon enough for the artist to benefit. Copyright runs out, too sad, too bad. The artist looks on as everyone suddenly “discovers” their work and just loves it. (But too late for the artist to be compensated for their work.)
We’re going around with this again. If there is no audience, then society is not losing out by it not being in public domain. NO AUDIENCE, remember? (Except for the crap collectors, who, to be honest, I’m not overly concerned about.) If their work does end up having an audience, why, golly gee, I think they are entitled to benefit from that, even if it takes a little longer.
Cite what? Go back and read this thread! There’s 11 fucking pages of cite right under your nose. I’ll even repost the Janis Ian cite in case you’re too damn lazy to scroll 1/3 of the way down page 4 and find it yourself.
