Both of those options are the same from the seller’s perspective (he gets no money either way and he’ll be unaware of any illegal copying), and one of them is better for the consumer (getting something instead of nothing), so ISTM there’s very little reason to choose the worse one, rationally speaking.
Look, there’s no doubt that as a matter of policy, one can argue that any given property right should be abolished. There are or have been societies that don’t signficantly recognise rights of individual chattel ownership (such as the Australian Aborigines). For significant periods in English history private ownership of land by ordinary people was not recognised. But if you review this thread, many seem to argue that taking the system as it is copyright is inherently silly or illogical or unfair, which I don’t think it is.
In your post #126 above you said you like “the chainsaw example” and you gave other examples: What do those examples illustrate? What was your point?
That’s all you need to see as far as I’m concerned. One of the key disjuncts that one sees in these debates is in people who (a) want free access to useful and/or entertaining IP, but (b) don’t want the array of such IP to diminish, but don’t see the contradiction between those desires.
I’ll give **Mr2001 ** this much: he’s believes as I understand it in a sort of “let the information be free” ideal, and he considers and has admitted that a massive reduction in the availability of movies, books etc he would regard as small price to pay for the realisation of his ideal. Most of the other participants on the anti-copyright side of the debate (and I’m not singling you out, Indistinguishable) don’t seem to be as intellectually honest with themselves.
Numerous property rights have limitations that affect value. For example, ownership of land is subject to all sorts of restrictions: laws that limit the type of use to which it can be put, laws restricting what can be built on it etc.
Copyright gives certain rights. It doesn’t give others even though they’d be valueable. So what?
So take the next step and realise that avoiding those consequences is not the goal of copyright. Find me an authority to show that the goal of copyright is to absolutely maximise the value of a copyright holder’s rights in every single way.
Indeed. Now that we’ve got your nitpicky attempt at distraction out of the way, go back and explain the substantive point, namely why your chainsaw example isn’t stupid for the reason Sage Rat gave. It’s blatantly obvious that devaluing someone else’s stock by selling a cheaper comparable product that you own is completely different to devaluing someone else’s stock by infringing their property right.
This argument is economically naive. Value is a function of scarcity. Not that this hasn’t been explained to you in thread after thread after thread.
It’s perhaps not economically naive, but it is a little odd to think we can with any great success maintain the actual price of a good at one far higher than that of the marginal cost of production.
Why not?
What do you suggest?
Sorry about the late edit, I hit submit too early.
That’s unfortunate, because it was in fact an astoundingly idiotic example.
If the chainsaw manufacturer has a deal with both Home Depot and Ace Hardware, then it doesn’t matter who gets the sale, the manufacturer gets paid either way. A problem would arise however, if Home Depot acquired the chainsaws it sold by lifting them from the back of a delivery van that the manufacturer left open. Then Home Depot is depriving the manufacturer of money from a sale that they had a right to expect their fair share of return on.
Not an applicable example. Copyright law does not recognize or protect the right of profit from one’s artistic effort nor the right to the sale of every copy. It only protects the right of the copyright holder to decide under what circumstances the work is distributed. Those circumstances may involve payment of cash, they may not. The point of the law is that only the copyright holder gets to decide the circumstances.
Also not applicable. Again, copyright does not protect the right to profit, only the right to decide terms of distribution.
If we are talking about a physical disc, then the record company has not lost a sale, or at least has not lost the money from distribution, which is what copyright protects. There has been only sale from which the record company could expect a profit, and only one copy has been circulated.
Same as the previous example. One copy remains in circulation, and the proceeds from one copy have gone to the appropriate parties, presuming the album was distributed through legitimate channels.
Indeed it has, and this the only one of your examples so far that deals with an actual copyright violation. There are now two copies of the disc in circulation between the two of you, where the copyright holder has only authorized distribution of one. If the copyright holder has only authorized that copies of the album be distributed under circumstances that involve them getting paid for each copy, then they have a demonstrable loss, in that there are two copies where the holder has only received the agreed payment for one.
If you post a song file on a website where you expect that others will download it, there is nothing inherently wrong with that act, as long as you are the copyright holder or acting with their express authorization. The point is that even if you own some sort of copy of a copyright-protected work, it does not give you the authority to decide terms of distribution, no matter how easily the means to have the power to distribute are available to you. Only the right of the copyright holder to make these decisions is recognized by the law.
It doesn’t give others even though copyright holders want them, and even though they could be justified by the same arguments that are used to justify the current set of rights. That tells me those arguments aren’t very good, or at least that the people who put them forward aren’t very honest or consistent, and that I shouldn’t be too worried when copyright holders complain that some change in policy would upset them.
Sure, right after you find me where in my post I used the words “absolutely” or “in every single way”.
The arguments in favor of banning used CD sales are the same arguments used in favor of prosecuting file sharers: artists deserve to get paid when people enjoy their work, offering a used CD deprives the artist of the income he’d get from a new sale, etc. I don’t find them convincing whether they’re applied to used CD sales, file sharing, or copyright in general.
I do find it interesting that others expect anyone to be convinced by those arguments in one situation when they themselves aren’t convinced in the other, though. If the pursuit of these goals is worth restricting speech, which is a fundamental freedom guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, then surely it should be worth restricting trade too.
Not when the “property right” is copyright, because in that case, “infringing their property right” just means offering the same thing at a lower price. That property right is a monopoly on distributing a certain product, and the only difference is that chainsaw manufacturers don’t have a similar monopoly.
If it were that simple, the recording industry would collapse every time Apple backed up their iTunes servers. I assume you meant to use a colon before “value” instead of a period, because what’s really naive is thinking that making new copies can magically change the value of a product, even when there’s been no change in the number of people who are willing to trade money for a copy, the number of copies available for sale, or the amount they’re willing to pay for one.
Value is a function of scarcity only because scarcity affects what people are willing to pay. In this case, since the downloader isn’t willing to pay anyway, his choice to download it has no economic effect; no one but the downloader and the person who sent him the file will ever know the difference. You don’t need to be Adam Smith to figure that out.
You realize Indistinguishable was asking about morality and whether these examples counted as “essentially theft” in the minds of those who think copyright infringement counts as “essentially theft”, right? Not about legality or whether they could be considered copyright infringement.
Quite right; in fact, I do believe I made this explicit in the end of that post.
Just a small correction, though; it was not Princhester who your quote came from, but scotandrsn.
Ah yes, sorry about that.
I notice that you are segueing from a discussion of existing rights into a discussion of attempts to change policy. I’m not talking about that.
The argument simply runs that if people are given rights that give them a route to economic reward from the production of useful or entertaining IP, they will produce it. The specific level of rights awarded is not part of the argument. Your suggestion that if some limitation on those rights is acceptable, then the argument that some rights should be awarded is invalid is arrant absolutist nonsense. If it made a skerrick of sense it would be an argument against most forms of real and personal property.
I do understand that you don’t wish to recognise copyright law. Nonetheless, copyright law being what it is there is, as I said, a very major difference.
Actually I believe the definition of naive is someone who thinks that if people know they can morally justify to themselves getting something for nothing if they believe they wouldn’t pay for it if they couldn’t get it for free, the value of what they will pay will remain precisely the same. What that requires is an assumption that the general public are absolutely honest, with vendors and themselves. I was not born on the 9th of October 2007. How about you?
If apples can be bought from stalls for $1 and then it magically rains apples, but there is a law that says you can’t pick one up and eat one unless you wouldn’t have bought one from a stall anyway, you actually, truly, with your bare face hanging out, think that the real world practical economic scarcity of apples (as relevant to their purchase price) would not decrease? You have got to be frickin’ joking.
I know you were responding to something that you only mistakenly thought I’d posted, but nonethless let me take shot at this: it is only your assumption that there is any difference between what “those who think copyright infringment counts as ‘essentially theft’” consider to be immoral, to be ‘essentially theft’, to be illegal and to be copyright infringement.
I live in this Western society of ours, the most comfortable and wealthy ever known, with its democratic creation of laws, and the rule of law. I like the fact that there is massive investment in useful and entertaining IP. I don’t want that investment to stop. Theft is what our property laws say it is. Copyright infringement is what our property laws (specifically copyright laws) say it is. Immoral includes breaking good laws. Copyright is a good law. Copyright infringement is “essentially theft”. Illegal is breaking laws.
Downloading a song illegally is much the same as taping a film on TV, or a song from the radio, or watching a film in a public setting (e.g. a teacher might show her pupils the film version of a book they’re studying). Why do some people take such a strong moral stance on only music downloads?
/* OK, in this specific case there’s good reason to suppose the defendant was knowingly distributing music, but I want to talk about the average “pirate” because it seems that most of this discussion is quite general. */
So putting the moral arguments to one side for a moment, all I want to say is that in my opinion the music industry’s war on piracy is completely the wrong line to take.
All they needed to do was on the one hand embrace the technology and try to get their entire libraries up on a cheap, fast site with no DRM. And obviously go after big sites that try to distribute free music.
The average man on the street would then just pay for music rather than have the hassle of trying to find tracks elsewhere – this is demonstrable from the success of iTunes, despite its tiny library (I know the number of tracks they claim to have, but I’m skeptical. I’m often disappointed when I search for tracks), DRM and terrible design.
I buy music from iTunes. But if it was half as good as Napster I’d buy a heck of a lot more.
If a “route to economic reward” were the only goal, then copyright wouldn’t be necessary at all. You don’t need special rights to get paid for working.
Again, the moral argument against file sharing – it deprives people of sales and devalues property and all that – is also the argument against used CD sales. I know what the law says, and that’s irrelevant here. I’m not talking about adding or removing points of copyright law. I’m talking about the moral claim that unauthorized copying is “wrong” or “essentially stealing”. If that moral argument isn’t persuasive in the case of used CDs, then why should we find it persuasive in the case of file sharing?
Maybe, maybe not, but we’re getting so far away from the original context that it hardly matters. If you recall, I was talking about a particular situation and what the rational choice was to make in such a situation, not about any hypothetical side effects on the market or whatever. That is, given the choice between lose-lose and win-lose, a rational actor should choose win-lose.
Is this a purely hypothetical situation where we, the people discussing it, agree as part of the discussion that the people taking those apples truly wouldn’t have bought one? You know, like the one I made that remark about? Then yes, I do believe that.
Actually, I’d say it’s the assumption of the person who posted those examples… and in fact, he was asking, not assuming.
But generally, it’s a safe assumption that there’s a difference between what someone considers immoral and illegal. Most people, in my experience, are not robots, and their consciences are capable of more than just parroting the law.
Hmm, one of those statements is not like the others, according to the Supreme Court.
Are you trying to segue from what I said about a “a route to economic reward from the production of useful or entertaining IP” into a statement about getting paid for working in other fields?
I’ve challenged you in the past to come up with a workable route to the former and you’ve accepted that much useful or entertaining IP simply wouldn’t be produced without copyright, or any other viable scheme you could come up with.
Because morals are often not absolute. They involve compromise and reasonableness.
You’re obfuscating. Quite simply, an entitlement to freely copy as long as you wouldn’t have bought a copy will, anywhere other than in La La land, reduce scarcity and therefore the value of a monopoly on the production of copies for sale.
No. Apart from the magical arrival of the apple rain, it was intended to be a real world question. That’s why it included the words “real world” and “practical”. They were intended as a clue. Now answer the question.
Agreed. They are also capable of deciding that the law roughly follows what they consider moral. In my case that’s what I’ve decided at least in this context. I suspect scotandrsn similarly.
What does this mean? I sure as hell hope you aren’t attempting to divert off into some stupid terminological discussion about copyright infringement and the term “theft”.
Nope, just pointing out the obvious: there already was a route to economic reward.
I’m sorry if you don’t like that route, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It may not be a superhighway, but it still ends up at economic reward.
OK then, stop dancing around and let’s hear it. “Even though it deprives artists of income just like file sharing, buying and selling used CDs is still morally acceptable because _________.” Fill in the blank with as much explanation of that compromise and reasonableness as it takes.
If you truly wouldn’t have bought a copy otherwise, then downloading will not reduce scarcity or devalue anything. When you say “you wouldn’t have bought a copy” but you actually mean “you might have bought a copy after all”, that’s obfuscating.
All right, I’ll answer yours in the hopes that it’ll convince you to finally answer mine above. Please don’t disappoint me.
You wrote, “If apples can be bought from stalls for $1 and then it magically rains apples, but there is a law that says you can’t pick one up and eat one unless you wouldn’t have bought one from a stall anyway […] the real world practical economic scarcity of apples (as relevant to their purchase price) would not decrease?”
The problem with writing a law like that is we can’t objectively tell whether someone would’ve bought one from a stall anyway. Anyone can pretend that they wouldn’t have, and the prosecution will find it difficult or impossible to prove that they’re lying about their own decision-making process. Since the law is effectively unenforceable, and assuming that the law is the only thing keeping people from picking up these apples, we can indeed expect that the price would drop to zero as people break the law to obtain free sky-apples. (And frankly, who could blame them - a law forcing people to buy apples when there’s a limitless supply of free ones is nothing but a handout to apple farmers.)
Of course, that doesn’t apply to individual decisions when the standard is morality (which can be evaluated in one’s own head) instead of legality (which must be evaluated in a courtroom based on evidence and the presumption of innocence).
I’m just finding a bit of humor in the fact that you defined copyright infringement according to the law, and theft according to the law, but then you attempted to equate them in a way that the highest legal authority in the land has considered and rejected. You know, deferring to the law as long as it agrees with you, and ignoring it when it doesn’t. That’s funny. Maybe not hilarious, but it’s late.
I still don’t see how they can ever prove that she even posessed the songs in question, that she used Kazaa, and that she was the one operating the computer sharing the songs. Without finding them on her computer where’s the case?
Unlike a criminal case, they simply have to establish by a preponderance of the evidence the fact that she did it. We’ve been over this in the thread above; granted it’s buried back a ways now. :eek:
In short, the plaintiffs didn’t have to prove she did it beyond a reasonable doubt; they simply had to make it more likely than not she was the one. There is sufficient evidence to accomplish that.
Here’s a new wrinkle in the case’s implications:
Here’s a strategy idea for them: Why doesn’t the RIAA go f— itself?
You know, with the internet booming and digital recording being dirt-cheap, perhaps we need to advocate a completely separate collective for musicians, so they can avoid piping their music through RIAA altogether. Start a new setup, with new rights, so that people can actually listen to music in ways that they want.
You know, that apple thought experiment is quite helpful.
You can pass all the laws you want about how you can’t pick up apples that fall from the sky, that you have to purchase apples for $1 from someone with appleright, but it’s not going to work.
Harsh punishments for picking up apples that lie on the ground is silly, especially if only a few people are punished harshly. If there were cameras everywhere and pretty much everyone who picked up an apple lying on the ground were sent a $5 ticket, people might grumble, but it would seem at least somewhat fair. But if every year a few apple pickers were “made an example of” and fined $220,000, while most of the other apple pickers kept on picking up free apples, that seems pretty unfair.
The trouble in this argument is that people are trying to conflate the current law, the intent of the current law and the morality of the current law. Yes, violation of copyright is a crime under our current law. Yes our current law is intended to advance the useful arts and sciences.
That doesn’t mean that our current system is the only possible moral system.
We grant creators copyrights because we believe (or believed) that it was for the public good to do so. We want more creations, and copyright law provided an incentive for creators to create.
But some people in this thread are asserting something different. Not that if we want to advance the useful arts and sciences we should have some mechanism to encourage the useful arts and sciences, and hey, people like money, so why not give people money if they ATUAAS, and hey, it costs a lot of money to make copies of things, so why not restrict the right to copy creations to the creator, and that way the creator can make a lot of money, and we get lots of creations. No, they’re asserting that the creator has some sort of natural right to control the copying of their work. A moral right to control the copying of their work. And this is, of course, bunk, because there are lots of ways creators don’t have this right under our current scheme. That copyright infringement is stealing. But it isn’t stealing, it’s copyright infringement. It has some points of similarity to stealing, just as assault has some points of similarity to stealing, just as libel has some points of similarity to stealing, just as speeding has some points of similarity to stealing. But it isn’t stealing, and it isn’t malum in se, but rather malum prohibitum.
The fundamental problem is that the copyright scheme worked well under a particular technological scheme. Factories to produce copies of works…books, magazines, records, movies, were expensive. Easy to track, easy to find. Nobody would print a million copies of “Great Expectations” unless they thought they could sell the books, because creating a million books cost a lot of money.
But technology has changed. Copying is trivial, it can be done at the press of a button and costs nothing. It is no longer possible to track down people making copies of books or songs, because everyone has a printing press in their living room that can crank out millions of copies for free, and everyone has a system of trucks and warehouses and storefronts connected to their living room for free.
So our previous scheme, where control over copying was a rough proxy for usage, and granting creators a monopoly on copying their work compensated them and gave them the incentive to create, no longer exists. Get that through your heads. It is gone.
I don’t know what’s going to replace it, but we’re going to be forced to change our copyright laws, because those laws won’t work any more. Granting creators the exclusive right to copy their creations doesn’t advance the useful arts and sciences any more, because violations of that right can be done trivially. It’s like granting the owners of a building the right to sue anyone who looks at the building without permission, but there’s no fence around the building and it’s 50 stories high in the middle of the city. It’s like fining people $220,000 because they picked up free apples that fell out of the sky. In a case where apples fall out of the sky, trying to preserve the right of apple growers to sell apples doesn’t make sense anymore.
Of course, suppose apples will only fall out of the sky if apple growers still exist…if apple growers all go out of business then the free apples that fall out of the sky will stop falling. But draconian punishments of $220,000 to random people isn’t the answer, screaming that picking up sky-apples is stealling from apple growers isn’t the answer. It’s the tragedy of the commons.
Of course, the solution is to provide some other method of compensating apple growers, rather than harshly punishing randomly chosen people for picking up free apples. How should we do so? Well, there are several ways, and each different way has different pros and cons, different methods may mean more apples for everyone and more money for apple growers, more apples for everyone but less money for apple growers, or fewer apples for everyone and less money for apple growers. In my opinion, the only bad option is the last one. And the last one isn’t neccesarily a morally wrong option, because copyright isn’t a natural right of creators.
It is. But you have unhelpfully chosen the wrong focus.
Instead of punishing the ones who lean over to pick up a free apple, let’s consider that we punish the guys who drop apples from the sky wwhen they have no right to do so. It’s still not a perfect analogy, because you natural inclination with apples is to ask who owns the apple, and speculate the the owner of the apple is free to do as he wishes with it, including dropping it from the sky. If we posit that the droppers have stolen the apples, our analogy runs afoul of the fact that the legitimate apple sellers have just as many apples as they did before.
Still, if we can simply assume, as a matter of law, that the apple droppers are dropping apples illegally, that they have no right to do so… and then remember we’re punihsing THEM, rather than the innocent one that reaches for a single free apple… then we might be closer to a useful model.