Well actually you’ve just asserted that it doesn’t hold water. Some people understand the difference between asserting and explaining. Others don’t.
Right. And these people need to eat too. Let me put it this way. Let’s say a CD costs $15 to buy in the store, and the store buys it for $8.50, and the cost of manufacturing the CD is trivial. That $8.50 per CD, times the number of CDs sold, already covers the costs of paying all the production staff, advertising, and other middlemen. So far so good?
Now let’s say the artist gives permission to download the album for $10. That $10 per downloaded album covers everything the $8.50 covered plus an extra $1.50 for the artist. And it costs the buyer $5 less.
If anything, it’s interesting that you bring up this point. An artist who has already recorded and released an album has already covered the costs of all the production and middlemen. Especially if it was a couple of decades ago. In that case, the money can go directly to the artist. So they could charge only $1.50 (plus whatever royalties they’d get through the record label) for the album and make the same amount of money as they would otherwise.
PayPal.
Tell me again who has limited reading comprehension?
But software = intellectual property, and music = intellectual property. The fact that one can be distributed for free shows that it is technically possible for the other to be distributed for free.
What the hell was that? Okay, if you really honestly don’t understand what I just said, then let me reiterate:
Does this not explain why the analogy doesn’t hold water? Pretty bad when I have to quote myself!
No. If you had read and understood my debate with Mr2001 you would (or should) have understood that the issue was one of moral principle which Mr2001 specifically said was independant of the practical issue of how easily it is in reality to copy various sorts of things.
Have you no shame? I can understand how frustrating it must be to have nothing better than whiny emotional appeals to back up your position, but implicating my parents?
As for my humanity… if there’s anything more uniquely human than developing and sharing new ideas, I’d love to hear it. Hoarding resources and marking one’s territory is something any animal can do.
If I may “nitpick” again, that’s another problem with your analogy: You state outright that you need a mower, and that if you can’t get one for free you’ll buy it from that store.
In the real world, saying you’ve lost the “opportunity” to sell a product is merely a guess unless you know the motivation of your would-be customer. If another store down the street is selling the same mower for $80, then the guy selling them for $100 never had a chance to sell you one in the first place - as a rational customer, you would’ve bought the cheaper mower if you were to buy one at all. If you only had $50 to spend, then you would’ve found some other way to cut your lawn.
It’s especially true of music, which is a luxury item with a very subjective value.
How do you explain its immorality, then? I assume you have a more detailed explanation than “Because it’s his.”
I agree. A diary is private whether it’s in your night table, in your car, or left on a table in a restaurant. The location is one piece of evidence that could be used to argue that a work was private–if it’s in your night table, chances are you don’t want anyone to see it–but not the only one. The way you treat it is far more important: if you put a painting on the outside of your house for anyone to see, or a song on the radio for anyone to hear, it’s not private.
I assume you want an answer specfically about private works, since we’ve already done this question. Whether the painting is private would, I suppose, depend mainly on the content of the painting and the effort you’ve spent to keep it private. If you can show that you took care not to let anyone see it, that would support the argument that it’s private; but if you didn’t express any concern about the possibility of anyone else seeing it when you brought it into the shop, that would hurt your argument.
Indeed… I have two projects on SourceForge, one ~20,000 lines and one ~80,000 lines (of my own code - the larger one depends on about 30k lines of third party code).
But, apparently software just isn’t the same to some people. I can find time to write a hundred thousand lines of code and share them with the world, while still supporting myself at a job where my income doesn’t depend on how many copies someone made, but some people seem to think artists aren’t capable of that. Or maybe artists just don’t want to. Or maybe it’s all because of the difference between “REAL art made by REAL artists” and “lines of gibberish written by internet geeks” - anyone can write lines of gibberish, y’know, but it takes God-given talent and emotional investment to take a picture of a rock. 
I think aryk was referring to the fact that intellectual property can be copied, not the ease of downloading a song compared to breaking into a shop.
You’re whooshing me, right? Right?
Or have you forgotten what you wrote in your Straight Dope Profile?
Oh, here, let me remind you:
Yeeesh. If you had enough of a sense of humor to put that in your profile, I assumed you’d have enough sense of humor to realize that I’d alluded to it. (In other words, it was a little joke—no slight was meant towards your human parents, only the ones you mention in your profile.)
That is something to discuss on the GD thread. Please, why don’t you share your feelings there? I promise, no “alternaworld” or “WACKED” in that thread. (Well, at least not from me. ;))
Just to refresh your memory, we haven’t been talking about things published or put on public display. We are talking about unpublished things that are in people’s homes.
Do you seriously think that it’s “selfish” for someone not to want to share (against their will) the stuff that they have in their home? (And also, pictures that have had to go to a photo lab to get developed and printed, and paintings that have gone to the framer’s shop.) These things are not published nor put on public display.
But, once again, this portion of the discussion is also developing very nicely over in the GD thread.
Only an internet geek who had the artistic depth of a shallow pool would not understand the emotional investment that goes into taking a picture of a rock.
Ansel Adams: What’s the big deal? All he did was take pictures of rocks.
It takes talent to write code, too. And lots of patience, believe me. Just any old gibberish won’t compile, and my own coding has frequently involved complex algebraic functions.
Yes I was referring to the fact that IP can be copied. Ease, obviously, has little to do with the issue since illegal music piracy (bootlegging) has been going on for decades. I wonder how easy it was to make copies of 33rpm records. But as of 2003 it is very impractical to try to copy a lawnmower.
Oh, I know. I started a whole thread asking about it in Cafe Society a while ago, if you may recall.
But not all programmers are “programmed” (pardon the wretched pun) with the same artistic “sensitivity.”
For my analogy to be useful, all that needs to be true is that there be some people who will want a mower, and who will buy it if they can’t leech it. Not an unreasonable assumption, IMHO. That there are others who might not if they could not, is irrelevant.
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In the real world, a lot of the time the opportunity to sell stuff results in people selling stuff. That the opportunity may involve a degree of uncertainty, does not mean that the opportunity doesn’t exist. I’m not sure where you’re going with this.
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Plenty of people make a living out of the opportunity to sell luxury items. That it is an opportunity to sell at a subjective value makes no damn difference.
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That sounds like a pretty good explanation to me. It’s at least as good an explanation as yours as to why you shouldn’t have to respect other people’s property, namely: “cos I want it”
But if you would prefer a basis for morality arising out of something more practical, you could make reference to the sentence in my post under reply which you have otherwise ignored (“The opportunity to sell people things at a profit is why manufacturers manufacture, why wholesalers sell and why retailers open their doors”).
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What is that job, anyhow?
Whether hardware is difficult or impossible to copy should not affect whether in principle doing so should be any different, morally, from copying something which can easily be copied.
I found my mower analogy useful because what it did was show how commercially naive your position is. Your concern lay entirely in nitpicking about minor inconveniences to the hardware store owner. What you don’t care about is what would be, in reality, the major concern of the store owner: namely the destruction of his reason for opening the store in the first place: the opportunity to make a profit out of sales.
Your responses to my hardware store analogy reveal a bizarre dichotomy between your wonderfully deep concern that my mower leeching might cause the hardware store owner to have to swallow gnats and your total lack of concern about me forcing him to choke on camels.
When I studied criminology, one of the topics was the mental acrobatics that criminals use to justify themselves and deny wrongdoing. I remember three classic excuses. The first was blame the victim: “she deserved to be raped, she was a whore”. The second was to concentrate on the minor positive: “Yeah I nick stuff, but I’m not a criminal, I mean, I never hit nobody”. The third was the failure of the imagination (typically involving a suggestion that if there’s no direct effect there is no effect at all) as in “sure I embezzled millions from my government employer, but it’s not like I’d steal from an ordinary citizen”.
All three of those excuses are being used liberally by the pro-leeching lobby in this thread.
More then eat, they should be paid according to the agreement they signed.
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It’s not trivial, it costs the label about $4, which they sell for $8 or $9. Their profit is $4 to $5, not $8.50.
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Are you suggesting that once the album is in the black, people should cease to make money off of it? Once the costs have been covered, let’s stop charging? If so, this is the dumbest thing I’ve heard yet. The people involved are continually compensated, as they well should be. If a producer signs a contract stipulating he gets a quarter from each album sold, then he should get a quarter of each album sold. Or do we just say, “Ok you guys have made enough money now, move along, let someone else get some”?
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Let’s say the artist does not give permission to download their albums, which incidentally is the case with about 95% of today’s artists. This is what I, as an actual artist, actually give a shit about. No matter what distribution model I use, carrier pigeon or direct beam into your head, that gives you no right to steal it. Is it in my best interest to make it as easy as possible for people to get my music? Duh, of fucking course. If I’m an idiot and choose not to embrace technology and instead distribute 5 albums a week via carrier pigeon, that is my choice and my mistake.
As far as price, if I charge $75 bucks for my album, then I imagine I won’t sell many. On the flipside if I charge 75 cents, they may sell like hot cakes, but if I have to pay $3 (after my cut) royalties on each, that’s not good for me either. Don’t try to give me some “well you’ll make a profit off other things and get your music out there” bullshit. I can make a profit off CDs and everything else in that equation will hold true.
Anyway, no matter what I decide to charge for my work, it needs to be respected.
Other stuff -
If an artist gives permission, at that point it becomes legal, and after that I could care less if they charge a quarter a song, or $20 a song. Let’s also keep in mind that electronic distribution although cheaper then physical, still has costs associated with it. While there won’t be a cost to manufacture the media and packaging, enormous amounts of bandwidth will need to be available, and that ain’t free. We can get rid of the artists who make the cover art, however we’ll need a team of IT people to monitor distribution and watch over the computers. We could outsource that if we liked, but either way it ain’t going to be free. Is it cheaper? Sure. Is it more efficient? You betcha. Does it have fuckall to do with downloading IP against the wishes of the creator? Nope.
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No they haven’t. Secondly, if they have reached that point good for them, now any additional albums they sell will be profit.
Remember it works like this.
One time costs of album - Engineers, promotion.
Continuous costs - Artists, producers, Lawyers, anyone else that performed a function and was given a piece of each album. (a piece of the album can often be far more risky then a lumpsum mind you)
If an album does well, the one time costs will be recovered, but the middlemen will always make money as long as the album still sells, as they should.
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If they make the same amount of money either way what the hell is the point? Even if they wanted to be nice (assuming they are alive and or still care) and switch to a scenario where the cost was cheaper for the consumer, there are a bunch of entities (I’m sure the record label for one would love that idea) standing in their way. At the end of the day a lot of people are still making money off of Led Zeppelin, and if you lower the price, someone somewhere will get squeezed out, or someone will end up making less then what they make now. I’m sure “someone” will work damn hard to insure the things stay exactly the way they do. Fucked up but it’s the truth. That is music industry corrupt issue #67 we must tackle.
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A middleman you say?
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About the only thing they have in common.
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Sure it can be distributed for free, anything can, what’s the point?
What if I don’t want to give it away for free? What if I want to make money off of it? Then what?
In other words, the $4 to $5 covers the expenses that I was using the $8.50 figure to take care of? Then it takes even less than I thought.
No, I’m saying that once the lump sums have been taken care of, the royalties should go to the artists who put in their creative work.
See, copyright protects works that have some creativity, and royalties are payment agreed upon in contract for the use of copyrighted material. So while the cutting room floor might have some important work to do, their efforts are work that should be rewarded with a salary. The actual creative effort that is protected by copyright is what the songwriter writes and what comes out of the mouths and instruments in the band.
Exactly! For you see, the Information Age is maybe less than 2 decades away, and those who continue to stubbornly cling to the 20th century business model will soon find it to be as obsolete as carrier pigeons.
You say you are an artist - from your username would I be right if I guessed which group you’re with?
I’m not saying you won’t make a profit of CDs. I’m saying most artists today make profits from other merchandise, but that’s not the only way to do business.
Let me give you one example: say I hear Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper on the radio, and not having a tape handy, say “Ooh I’d like to get that song but don’t want to pay $15 for an album by an artist I don’t really like.” One song I want to get, by a group that I generally wouldn’t listen to. Suppose I could get permission to download it, in exchange for a small fee (whatever the band’s revenue would be from that album, divided by the number of tracks in the album) maybe rounded up to the nearest 25 cents.
Of course I could buy the single, but what if somebody wants Eagles’ Desperado, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven, or Billy Joel’s Until The Night? Or some new age or indie music that isn’t available in the stores and must be special ordered?
What about people who would like to buy music, but can’t afford to, and turn to downloading instead? Sure, you’d say they should do without (or listen to the radio). But we’ll say they’ve already downloaded. Now if the artists decided to let these people “legalize” their downloads, it could cost the consumer less and still pay the artist more even if these are individual songs and not entire albums. With an estimated 60 million filesharers online (no doubt that’s gone up by now) some with thousands of songs, there’s plenty of potential revenue out there.
What gets in the way of that is something I have an attitude with, the damn record labels and software publishers insist on having the copyrights transferred to them. If I had been willing to do that with my software, sure I could have made a profit from it by now but I didn’t choose to sign over my hard work.
If I buy the album that my favorite song is originally from, it won’t say “©1978 Gerry Rafferty” it’ll say “©1978 Capitol”. That, to me, is fucked up.
No I think the middlemen should be put in the lumpsum category. Ideally the artists should all be rich enough to afford lawyers. And lawyers aren’t exactly popular with me either.
Fucked up also because if today’s music was half as good as the music of the '70s and '80s I might not even be complaining.
PayPal is free, except for international currency exchange fees. And anyway, any idiot can write a check.
No, because the fact that one can be feasibly distributed for free means so can the other. I’m saying it would be nice if downloaders had a way to legalize their stash.
Do you have any idea how many people have been using the evaluation of Paint Shop Pro 4 because it doesn’t kick the user out, even long after the evaluation has expired? But you won’t see expired evaluations in use anyplace where the users might be caught with it (unless they’re foolish). Similarly, a person who has thousands of downloaded songs might want the peace of mind to know that they can’t be busted for having them.
Even if nobody does, the damage is done so what would it hurt to try?
Then let people who already have your music buy the right to legally keep it on their hard drives. nobody said your music has to be free, although with radios and the technology to record directly into the computer, a lot of it is anyway.
ok.
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And the people that invested in the creativity.
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Actually the copyright protects whoever owns it, which isn’t always the songwriter or the band.
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OK so the current industry has 10 or 20 years to adapt or it will start losing money hand over fist to some superior distribution model of the future.
The superior model does not involve downloading things for free by the way.
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You could probably guess a few bands. I’m not from England if that’s what you’re thinking.
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There are many ways to do business, some more profitable then others.
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Well sure of course that would be nice, but perhaps not every band has the resources to do this, or the logistics of providing such a service and not as beneficial to the band as current ones are. Perhaps in 10 or 15 years, a better model will emerge, perhaps not.
I happen to have such a raging toothache at the moment that I can’t even think at the moment.
I’ll finish this later.
No, the copyright is the right to copy and belongs to the owner. The copyright protects the work. Why would you say it protects the owner?
It doesn’t? Then what exactly does it involve, if I may be so bold as to ask?
Been there, done that.
It amazes me how many people who do not know anything more than the very basics of copyright law automatically assume that the RIAA’s position is legally correct. Their position has not been validated by the courts of any consequence other than the Ninth Circuit, and even that decision does not fully support their view.
The RIAA’s current strategy is simple:
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Play the victim. Cry that everyone is stealing and make it sound like every legal authority in the world agrees.
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Scare the opponent. Sue the little guy for a bunch of money. Announce the settlements that will come because the little guy can’t afford a lawyer, much less the risk. Chill sharing.
If you want to buy into the RIAA argument, fine. If you are going to flame those who do not buy into those arguments, please do so with specific cites sp that we can all be educated. There is no such thing as “the copyright law.” Copyrights, their limitations, fair use, etc. are embodied in a host of laws and court decisions.
There is absolutely no doubt that it is legal for you to make a tape of songs that you legally acquired and then give away a million copies. There is a specific law that covers that. Likewise, there is no doubt that it is legal to make a cd comprised of legally obtained songs on a cd burner that is a stereo component. Giving away a million copies of that cd is fine, too. The same law that covers tapes, covers stereo components in general.
The problem is when you begin using a computer. The law is far from settled, because it presents new applications of existing laws, and those laws are for the most part unchallenged in the current context. There is a logical disconnect in saying that a cd burner that is part of a stereo component yields legal copies, but a cd burner attached to a computer yields illegal copies. Certainly, there is a practical difference between mp3s and tapes because of the ease and cost of duplication. The law is not clear, however, on how that issue should be resolved.
Saying filesharing is “illegal” or worse yet “stealing” is a vast oversimplification that is simply not defensible without getting into an interpretation of the laws that apply or do not apply and the circumstances under which the files are being shared. Personally, I can’t wait until the RIAA sues the wrong person – a person willing to fight the issue vigorously – because then I think these very difficult questions will ultimately find an answer. As it did with VCRs and audiotapes, I am betting Congress will step in with a specific law to deal with a situation that was not contemplated when most of the current laws were enacted. I predict the DMCA will ultimately be substantially rewritten or interpreted in such a way that it will have to be clarified. It certainly presents a number of practical problems in its application and has been used as far more of a threat than the plain wording of the law allows.
Personally, I don’t like the defenseless to be picked on, and so regardless of my personal opinions on filesharing, I think suing a 12 year old is reprehensible. If the mother had half a brain, she would not have paid a dime and watched the RIAA try to collect from the girl. I think they would find that their judgment (assuming they got one because the girl did not contest the suit) was worthless. I have to commend the RIAA on becoming a public relations pariah. They lose much of the practical highground with their tactics.
I believe the current drop in sales of CDs is both cyclical and predictable. Whether filesharing affects sales is a matter of debate (and a difficult one at that), but most industry experts blame the current predicament on labels failing to take risks and sign good and interesting artists. The overall quality of music is down, as happens from time to time, and so sales have suffered. That situation needs more immediate remedy than filesharing IMNSHO.
Hey it’s the Pit. Feel free to flame me.
Heh, actually I did. Dec 1999 was a long time ago… :smack: :o
I’ll check out the GD thread for your other points.
The opportunity to sell stuff results in people selling stuff because different customers have different needs. For a particular customer, though, the opportunity is either there or it isn’t. While the store owner might lose an opportunity when one customer gets the product for free, he might not lose an opportunity when another customer does the same thing.
Suppose Bob’s friendly local hardware store is selling mowers for $100, and the national chain store a block away is selling the same mowers for $80 to savings club members (discounted from the $120 regular price). I’m a savings club member, so if I want to buy a mower, I’ll buy it at the chain store.
Now suppose I sneak into Bob’s store after hours, zap one of his mowers with a cloning ray (avoiding the question of whether I’m making more work for the employees), and carry off the duplicate mower. What has Bob lost? Not a thing, because I never would have bought a mower from him in any case. I’m no less likely to buy his $100 mower than I was before. Indeed, if anyone has lost an opportunity, it’s the chain store!
Now let’s say the next day, my friend does the same thing: sneaks into Bob’s store after hours, zaps the mower with a cloning ray, and carries off the duplicate mower. However, this friend refuses to join the chain store’s savings club, so if he were to buy a mower, he would have bought it from Bob. In this case, Bob has lost the opportunity.
So if you want to use the lost opportunity as a basis for calling this act immoral, you have to take into account that the opportunities are not all equal for everyone, and thus the act may not be immoral for everyone.
The difference is in the likelihood that a person who gets a song for free would buy the CD if that were the only way to get the song. You can’t seriously expect that a college student with 10,000 MP3s would actually spend $10,000 on CDs if he couldn’t get the MP3s for free.
That sounds awfully familiar, I suspect we’ve already been here.
Twenty bucks says you can’t find a post of mine where I’ve ever said content should be free because I want it. I believe IP owners shouldn’t have certain rights, and I’m speaking as an IP owner myself.
(As for the opportunity to profit and the reason for opening the store, see above and below.)
Software engineer and network admin for a small business in the field of holography and document security. The software I write works together with the hardware we sell, so piracy isn’t a concern. If someone invents a cloning ray, of course, then we might be in trouble. 
Items that are necessarily scarce are fundamentally different from items that can only be made scarce through deliberate effort and government enforcement.
I agree that if it were possible to copy physical property with some sort of “cloning ray”, then the morality of doing so would be the same as copying intellectual property - because it would mean that physical property is no longer scarce.
There are plenty of things that could destroy his reason for opening the store: a competitor selling better products for less, or perhaps a fundamental shift in the way things are built that renders the hardware store obsolete (unlikely for hardware stores, but quite likely for record stores).
Shrug. If I’m a monster for not acknowledging the store’s “right to profit”, then I guess I better find some kids to scare.
serenitynow, I am glad to read that. But as you said, this is the Pit. Some of the Dopers here are going to be very skeptical or even defensive and insist that you provide cites for these claims. They sound too good to be true.
I hope I didn’t give the impression that any of my posts referred to “the” copyright law. My knowledge on the subject is, as I stated, based on a crash course I took before publishing my own software a couple of years ago. So I have some background in the subject.
World Eater and Princhester, it looks like you’re up against somebody who is very knowledgeable.
Then my friend, who is flat broke, walks into Bob’s store, zaps the mower with a 1920s style cloning ray and now nobody has lost the sale. And now he has his own lawnmower instead of needing to borrow mine.
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A very long winded way of saying not everyone who leeches something would have bought what they leeched if they hadn’t had the opportunity to leech it. True. And of course, everyone who leeches is going to say afterwards that they wouldn’t have bought it if they hadn’t had the opportunity to leech it. Self serving and convenient, and even if true, too bad. If it’s not yours, you can’t have it. Tough.
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You’ve said that you feel it is an infringement on your rights to not be able to use other peoples stuff. Same thing.
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And wouldn’t that be poetic justice…
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You are conflating two things here: good original IP is scarce, but copies of that IP are not scarce if they can be freely copied. This is precisely why government enforcement of IP rights is necessary and moral: without that, leechers take advantage of the latter, thereby stifling the stimulus to create the former.
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There are plenty of things that might destroy your car: fire, a crash. Therefore I may steal it. A particular business may fail, therefore I may embezzle from it.
You love “right to profit”. You are the only one saying it. It is a classic straw man. It is not a question of having a right to profit, it is a question of wanting to live in a world where people are motivated to provide services that I want, and do so because I pay them for doing so fairly. And others who leech from those service providers are ultimately leeches on me.
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If you want to propound a particular view of copyright law, please do so with specific cites so that we can all be educated.
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Known as the copyright law.
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I am not very familiar with US copyright law. Certainly in every jurisdiction with which I am familiar this might be legal (ie not criminal) but it would certainly be actionable at the suit of the copyright owner, absent their permission. So why don’t you provide one of those specific cites so that we can all be educated. After all, there is a “specific law that covers that” so: citey witey?
Because from what I can see, according to this and this you are dead wrong.
Even if through some techinical legal loophole I’ve never heard of, it’s possible to copy a million CDs, that has nothing to do with whether it’s a nice thing to do.