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ISPs to Start Policing Copyrights by July 1st...
- Thread starter PokéTrainer J
- Start date
This. If you really think about it, nothing else really matters here. People are so caught up on the idea of "ownership" that it's beginning to clash with an era where certain resources (e.g. physical-in-some-sense copies of songs) aren't scarce anymore. Forget censorship, forget "stealing", forget internet law enforcement. Laws of copyright and ownership need to be redone, to reflect the current reality. If people are putting voodoo magic on their work so that the customer runs into hassles even after buying the work, of course more potential customers will resort to piracy. The same goes when stuff is still under copyright protection for most of a century after the author is dead and can't give a damn about it. Are we really celebrating the fact that movie makers have to pay some random dude to use Happy Birthday?
Enforcing laws on the internet is not inherently bad. Badly made laws can and will compel people to break them, though. And we should stop blaming the people for the government's mistakes.
actually, that's democracy. if more than half the population says something is okay, then it becomes okay. in fact, the whole point of government is to prevent the things that most of us agree are bad.
in any case, you ignored my point about people having inherent morality. people will not start stealing cds en masse because most of us consider that kind of behaviour unethical.
on top of that, making something more difficult or punishing it more harshly will not make people decide it's unethical. they might stop doing it out of laziness or fear, but that's terrifyingly orwellian and absolutely not the way the world should be run.
i would like to know where all the free-market evangelists disappear off to when this issue comes up. if the industry is going to die, it dies. it will be replaced with new jobs elsewhere. we already know that independent people can create awesome works and distribute them through media like youtube. if the recording industry wants to stay in bidness, they need to keep up with the rest of us. if not, they'll be replaced, and nothing valuable will be lost.
(also, 'stealing' involves depriving the owner of property, which copying does not.)
"slavery"
I'm not saying stealing music is akin to slavery, but the outlook that majority consensus is the only thing that decides what is and isn't ethical is severely flawed.
If you agree that stealing is bad, then no matter how you look at illegally downloading things, it is bad, because it is stealing (intellectual property is still property even if it's not something tangible.)
The free market can't keep up with this because you're talking about a market that is looking to get paid for their property competing against something that is free. It's like condemning a meat factory for not "getting with the times" if some other group of people starts stealing meat from every meat factory in the country and giving it away for free.
Pretty much this. If I want to pirate something then I will do so. My mind has already been made up. That isn't to say I've never bought anything digital (quite the contrary). This isn't going to stop anything. If people still want to pirate they will find some loophole or backdoor to get whatever they want.
I feel pretty confident that if your ISP turns your internet off for downloading things illegally, you'll stop doing it.
you seem to be under the impression that absolute, objective morality is a thing. it's not -- morality is an agreement among all members of a particular culture. in archaic greece, slavery was acceptable, because most people didn't have a problem with it. what we think of as "moral progress" is groups coming to agreements that are more egalitarian, but that does not make one 'right' or 'wrong'.
this is going to be my last response to your 'stealing' propaganda: the owner of the music (i.e. the person who paid money for it) is willing to share it with me. in accepting, i am not denying them their rights nor removing the property from their possession. this is something that has always been possible (e.g. book lending, public readings) and for as long has been decried as "the death of so-and-so" when people were just trying to share their wealth.
remember when the printing press put thousands of copyists out of work, but then literature didn't die and everything turned out way better?
this is going to be my last response to your 'stealing' propaganda: the owner of the music (i.e. the person who paid money for it) is willing to share it with me. in accepting, i am not denying them their rights nor removing the property from their possession. this is something that has always been possible (e.g. book lending, public readings) and for as long has been decried as "the death of so-and-so" when people were just trying to share their wealth.
remember when the printing press put thousands of copyists out of work, but then literature didn't die and everything turned out way better?
If my ISP shuts down my internet then I'll just go back to swapping thumbdrives and bringing my externals over to my friend's house.
Try as you may you can never stop piracy.
Try as you may you can never stop piracy.
When you lend a book, there is still only one copy of the book, and only one person can use said book at a time.
When you "share" music, you aren't actually sharing or lending it, you're copying the music and giving it to someone for free. There is now an illegitimate replica of an item that the original owner (the one who sold it in the first place) never intended to exist. You may not be denying the person who bought the song anything, but you ARE denying the owner of the intellectual property their rights.
Unless you don't think intellectual property should ever be protected, and at that point I sincerely hope you come up with an idea for something amazing that gets stolen from you and mass produced without your consent.
Uh, this is completely unrelated. The copyists didn't own the book rights, they were merely a tool for putting the story onto paper. The transition of copyists to printing press is more related to the transition of hand harvesting crops to using a thresher. It has nothing to do with the transition away from people being able to have control over the amount of copies of their intellectual property that are in circulation and being rightfully compensated for those copies.
In my opinion, piracy is a sort of natural limiting factor to any institution. It is a necessary evil that limits the power of any one corporation from exceeding acceptable limits. In other words: it puts them in their place.
I believe that instead of putting all this ridiculous statutes in effect, governments should focus on educating people on why internet piracy has such devastating effects on people. Right now, people just focus on "oh hey Brittney Spears owns 7 yachts and 9 private islands so me getting free music won't do anything". If people are educated, they can make their own educated moral judgments.
I judge pirating as morally sound :)
EDIT: However, I guess if the music industry wasn't able to make such gross profits they wouldn't be able do things like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7SoPVDOllk&feature=g-logo&context=G23978f5FOAAAAAAAFAA)
I believe that instead of putting all this ridiculous statutes in effect, governments should focus on educating people on why internet piracy has such devastating effects on people. Right now, people just focus on "oh hey Brittney Spears owns 7 yachts and 9 private islands so me getting free music won't do anything". If people are educated, they can make their own educated moral judgments.
I judge pirating as morally sound :)
EDIT: However, I guess if the music industry wasn't able to make such gross profits they wouldn't be able do things like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7SoPVDOllk&feature=g-logo&context=G23978f5FOAAAAAAAFAA)
It's not stealing when the owner of the material (the real owner, I.e. the artist, not the production company) wants others to have the material and don't care about whether or not they pay for it... do you really think good musicians (read: not shitty pop artists) make music for the money or fame? No, they do it because they love music and they want to share their passion with the world.
There's no negative spin you can put on this, it's sharing no matter how you look at it, and our basic human morality says that haring is "right".
Well I've always thought pirating music at least was pretty much ripping and burning a cd for a friend on a massive scale, so I really don't see a problem with it. I mean 90% of artists don't really care, but to record companies, album sales are pretty much their only revenue.(I don't know if they get anything from merch and concerts) So I can see why they're mad, even though it's not technically their music. What I don't understand is that it's these big companies that are really pushing this, but smaller companies like Solid State Records really don't care when you think they should. It sort shows which companies actually look to what the artist wants and to not what they want.
mattj
blatant Nintendo fanboy
90% of statistics are made up on the spot
as a musician myself, who freely gives away music, I'm pretty sure that 110% of artists do care
Except piracy isn't really bad? I have a friend who is a music major, and for some project he studied the effects of piracy of the music industry. I can easily go to him for a refresher of actual facts, but I'm pretty sure Usher had an album that was illegally leaked all over the internet before release, and that same album had record sales. Add to that, like several people said in the thread, if they couldn't pirate, they wouldn't buy it. So its not like its a terrible crime thats worth the invasion of privacy and trouble it takes to set up.
mattj
blatant Nintendo fanboy
I could be mistaken, but I highly doubt that anyone anywhere wouldn't by a single CD, or single track ever. Unless you're talking about some poor starving African. Our entire Western society is saturated with and nearly addicted to music. I've known one person in my entire life that just seriously "wasn't into music" at all. Never bought a CD. Never listened to the radio.
On second thought, I'm not qualified to talk about what I would or wouldn't buy at all because I have a pretty large pre-existing library of CDs. I guess that was a pretty unfair example. But the point remains, piracy isn't a huge problem. At least I haven't heard actual facts supporting the idea that piracy is ruining artists, if anyone has them, please share.
I'll admit I didn't word that well, I was trying to echo what theamericandream38 was saying.
Also 90% of people don't know when someone is using a figure of speech.
mattj
blatant Nintendo fanboy
I'm pretty sure that its ruining game companies. I follow gaming news and its like every week another studio is shutting down. If people were forced to actually pay for all those games they illegally share and download that wouldn't be happening at nearly the same rate. Of course you've got giants like Nintendo and Pokemon that are so insanely popular that they can sell 4 million copies in the first week even with all the piracy going on, but there are tons of little guys who just can't handle it.
The video game bubble is ruining game companies. If 60 dollars is too much to pay for a game, people will pirate and buy used.
I don't support piracy, I'm just saying it's a symptom of a larger problem.
Could you please link? Its not that I don't believe you, its just a problem I never knew existed and I'd like to look into it to better formulate my opinions.
If you don't want to be paid for your work, then by all means provide it for free. But if I make a song, and I sell it to people under the condition that it not be reproduced and distributed (which is a condition that is literally in every CD booklet and digital download terms of service), then I have the right to prosecute those who break this agreement.
It's your individual copy of my work, so you have the right to do with what you want WITH THAT ONE INDIVIDUAL COPY, but the intellectual property is mine, and the right to set the terms of reproduction and distribution is mine, not yours.
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-09-09/...-piracy-software-piracy-game-sales?_s=PM:TECH
Even though it's cnn, it's a pretty good article.
Devs raise video game prices, people pirate games because of the price, Devs decide to take anti-piracy actions, people who don't pirate games gets screwed by those actions. It's seriously a domino effect of fail.
Not to disagree with you, but a fair amount of game piracy is games that are either old games not making money anymore, not localized to a certain area, or too rare to get a legitimate copy of (although this isn't as common as the other 2).