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Author | Topic: SOPA/PIPA and 'Intellectual Property' | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jon Inactive Member
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I'd definitely buy an early ticket to see this movie made:
Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member
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Copyright was never meant to create an IP that would produce royalties forever, even when you passed the IP along to your children or grandchildren. At some point we're supposed to regain unfettered access to our own culture, because now that he's dead, I should be as much the owner of The Hobbit - a work that was incredibly influential to my development as a young person - as JRR Tolkien ever was. I'm as much the creator of that work's cultural significance as he is. Not to mention that artists and inventors are products of their culture and the public. They vastly benefit from the public market for their goods.
I think the problem, here, is that we've allowed the fictious construct of "intellectual property" to override our rights with respect to our own real property to the detriment of everyone except a small group of powerful, well-monied rightsholders. ... And "allowing" is exactly wrong. MGM is free to put whatever DRM they want on their movies, to punish the people who decide to pay for it. I propose no law against restrictive DRM technologies that result only in an inconvenience for the customer. They have no right to demand that the government enforce that, or make it illegal for someone to circumvent rights technologies on content they've legally purchased. It's a far cry from "requiring someone to allow people to distribute movies for free." I cannot agree with you here. The companies do not inform the consumers of the limitations DRM places on their use of the media they purchase. And retailers rarely allow returns on such products. I had to spend extra money purchasing an RF modulator, even though I have a VCR that will easily modulate the RCA signal coming from my DVD player to a coaxial output I can plug into my television. I had to do this because the DRM on many DVDs and built into my DVD player causes the picture's brightness and contrast to fluctuate while watching a movie if the DVD player is running through a VCReven if the VCR is not recording or even has a tape in it. The current laws allow companies to manufacture and sell intentionally defective products to consumers that actually prevent their fair and legal use of physical property that they have legally purchased. And I am sure many other people have stories of workarounds they've had to employ just to use media they've legally purchased. In fact, my girlfriend's father is out a video game after buying a new computer and learning that he cannot register it on more than one computer; the old computer being shot, he's found himself the proud owner of nothing but a coaster. Go figure! JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
The DMCA mandated that all VCR's sold include "Macrovision", a form of analog DRM. It's an enormous government-granted monopoly to the Macrovision Corp, another way in which the law is distorting the marketplace here. And, as we all know, any laws that require particular technologies in manufactured goods are innovation killers.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
A similar discussion over at FRDB has cropped up.
I keep getting censored. If anyone wants to come over and start posting, though, I'm sure they can't censor us all. http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=311064 SPREAD THE WORD! ABE: Here's the stuff that's been censored: http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?p=7055624#post705... Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies! |
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Jon Inactive Member |
Western cinemas would not break the law showing pirated movies, shops would not sell pirated movies. But both of those things do currently happen, yet Hollywood stays in business. Everything you think would happen in a "copyfree" society is already happening, we already live in your worst-case scenario yet there's no shortage of profit from content creators. I'm not sure I can see agreement here with my own sentiments and senses. I have to agree with Tangle that complete removal of copyright would quickly result in theatres showing movies and not paying for them. The only fix that the movie makers would have would involve convincing the theatres (instead of the people) to invest in their product. Which might be an alright thing. But it isn't the world we live in now. Movies would still get made, don't get me wrong, and theatres would still play them for free and make killer profits. But it is a little inaccurate to say that we currently live in a 'worst-case scenario' regarding copyright, because we don't. On a side note, I am all in favor of copyrights that prevent others from financially profiting off of other people's work. But I think that is as far as copyrights need to go. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Another thing that crashfrog seems to overlook are the people who would download movies and music if it were legal, but don't because it is illegal. Claiming that we currently live in a world where everyone who wants to download does is just wrong. I know quite a few people who obey the law, even when they think the law is stupid, including people who won't download, or who won't smoke marijuana, "only" because they are illegal. I agree. There are people who don't download things just because doing so is illegal. The question is: how many of those people who don't download (but know how and easily could) instead buy the content that they would otherwise get for free were doing so not illegal? When we add up the numbers, I don't think that these people represent a significant or even noticeable chunk of the revenue for the entertainment industry. In other words, I think these folk are insignificant to the issue one way or the other. I might be wrong, and if you believe they play a noticeable role, then by all means I will welcome your presentation of the evidence that they do. But it has been my personal experience that these people just don't matter in the overall equation. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member
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2. The internet and the digitalisation of content has made the piracy of copyright material easy, threat free and for a generation of younger people, guilt free. This will worsen. This is a technology issue. The owners of the technology have always been the ones in control of the dissemination of content. A brief history: The people who had access to scribes and writing could copy books and distribute them as they wished, but those people were limited. They controlled the dissemination of that information, except for, as crash has mentioned, oral recitations. Then there was Gutenberg. And the people, limited in number, who had access to the technology of the printing press controlled the dissemination of the content. Except, again, for some oral recitations. The people who owned the musical instruments controlled the dissemination of music, except for people who could hum a good tune. Then there was recording. The technology for stamping records was expensive, and only a few people had access to it. They controlled the dissemination of music for a while. Then these cool things came out, kind of like 8-tracks, only not as sucky, called 'cassette tapes'. They could be used to record things from a record and disseminate the music to a wide audience. Anyone who had that technology was somewhat in control of the dissemination of that music. Then there was an Internetty thing, which functioned on computers, which could hold both the content of written works and the content of audio works. As we can predict from the rest of the history, the people who had/have access to this technology control the dissemination of any content the Internet can carry. And so it has been the case throughout the ages that the people who own the necessary technology have always owned the content. It has nothing to do with 'a generation of younger people' who run around theiving without guilt or shame. It is simply a matter of a new technology, one which does not rest in the hands of a small group of people but instead in the hands of the people at large. And that's where the issue lies; these entertainment companies want it the good-ol'-days way. They want a few peoplethemin control of the dissemination of content. But, hey. that's just not the world we live in anymore. Large numbers of people are now in control of the dissemination of the content by virtue of having access to the necessary technology. And this is actually a good thing. Hildred McOldIrish could never have dreamed of access to all the information we have today. Instead, she lived her life a poor illiterate peasant, dying from an easily curable (by modern standards) disease at the young age of 35, never knowing nothing much about anything but potatoes and little green men (not the X-files kind). The entertainment industry wants us to return to the era of Hildred, where only a few people have control over the dissemination of content. That a government would even entertain the idea as far as ours has so far done should put fear into all of us and call us from our television-induced comas to make sure that they do not take away the technological progress that so many people have worked so hard to advance. Not to mention the threat to education and access to culture posed by such foolishness. And this is in addition to what I've said before; that if a company wants to profit from a technology they have to suffer from it too, or else it's up to them to minimize that sufferingnot the government.
Companies - like Microsoft and SAS that are reliant on software rights would fall as their content would become worthless. Many would say that they can live without these things but they really haven't thought it through. OpenOffice.org 3. It's unlikely that any measures that the megalithic copyright holders try can do anything to protect their rights in the long run but not everyone everywhere will break the law - particularly businesses. What rights? For the longest of human history it has always been the case that those with access to the technology have access to the content and control its dissemination. The notion that we need to stop people from using the technology they have access to is a rather novel, and a rather stupid, one. Scribes always copied books without worry if they wanted a copy of the book. If they had the technology, they had the content, and it was the same for anyone else. There have never been anything so silly as 'rights' to ideas and information and content that haven't been rife with injustice.
1. Copyright law is necessary to protect the creator's work. Protected? Protected from whom? From people who want to enjoy it or learn from it? Is that who the creators want to keep their work from... from their audience? I really doubt it. But if so, these 'creators' need a new hobby. Jon * Oops; I neglected to include a history of visual performances, but I think it can be guessed based on the other histories (themselves just guesses).Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
If it became more the norm to download a movie for free, the perceived value of the movie tends to slide downward. I don't see how that would be the case. The people who download are largely the people who never intended to pay anything for seeing the movie in the first place. (And it is already 100% legal to see a movie without paying for it, so it has nothing to do with breaking laws). So you cannot rely on their behavior in determining selling price since they are not going to be market participants one way or the other.
Gold is worth a lot because of its rarity. If we took one of the asteroids that have a large amount of gold, and somehow mined it and shipped it back to Earth, the value of gold would end up decreasing. This is only true if the gold is put on the market. If the gold is stuck in a hole and never seen again, then it will have no impact on the price of gold. The same is true of media: if the people seeing it for free are largely the people who aren't going to participate in the market for the media in the first place, then their free viewing can have no impact on the selling price of that media. And the same is true of your analogy for counterfeiting money. If I printed off 1000 $100 bills at mint-quality, they wouldn't serve to devalue the rest of the money one bit until I put them into circulation. Without putting the 'infringers' into 'circulation' (i.e., without including them in the market) then there is no way their actions could deprive media of its market selling price. And for the most part, these free viewers aren't part of the market for the things they view freely. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Sometimes, I buy a movie so I can have it "legitimately" after downloading it and watching it. If the download were legitimate, I wouldn't buy it as well. Let me be more clear: The people who only download are largely the people who never intended to pay anything for seeing the movie in the first place.
I would say this is true, but if downloading a free copy of a movie is legal, how many people who would have paid to see it will decide not to? Are you saying it would be zero? I addressed this before; I think that that number of people is insignificant overall. I cannot see their activities having such drastic impacts on prices that you seem to imply in your post. The people who buy/pay to see movies:
But this premise remains unsubstantiated. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
The value of anything is in its scarcity or the cost it takes to create (and the cost of creation is usually dictated by the scarcity of materials needed to create it.) No... The value of anything is what other people are willing to give up for it. Scarcity doesn't make something more valuable. A meteorite hurtling at my head is a pretty scarce thing, but it is in no way valuable to me, because there is nothing I would give up in exchange for the opportunity of having a meteorite hurtling down at my headnothing. In fact, not having a meteorite hurtling at my head, despite being far less scarce, is more valuable to me, because were I in the path of a meteorite, there are few things I wouldn't give up in order to get myself out of its path. Value is a measure of perceived utility, quantified in terms of what we'll give up for that utility, and that quantity standardized in terms of currency. The only thing scarcity does is help reveal the perceived value. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
The number of people who are unable to download, either because of lack of broadband...or more importantly, lack of knowledge on how to download movies and music, then burn them in such a way as to use them elsewhere, is shrinking. In 20 years, the current generation of younger people, those who are generally more computer savvy and have grown up with the experience of downloading movies and music will replace the people who don't have a computer, don't have broadband, or don't have much computer knowledge. As those people die, or get access and experience, the amount of downloading will go up, and those who would have downloaded had it been available to them will begin doing so. This only reveals that there were, in fact, not as many people who actually thought the movie was worth the price being charged for it. Which only means that the entertainment industry needs to come up with content people actually want to pay for, instead of laws forcing them to pay for it.
I do see the potential for piracy to end up driving down the quality of especially movies. I wasn't aware that the quality of movies could get any lower than it already has. With the exception of some really big hits, most of the movies these days quite frankly suck ass, which is probably a large contributing factor to why people download them instead of paying to see them. For content that people actual want, there will always be a profitable market. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Yes, but wouldn't you say that not having a meteorite hurtling at your head would be even more valuable to you if it were more common for meteorites to be hurling at your head? No. The amount people are willing to pay does not change when the supply changes; only the amount that they actually pay changes.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Well, in that case, what we've determined is that nothing is worth anything, because if everything were free, people would take the free option over paying for it. Because no one ever puts money in the hat of a street performer...Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Really? It's as easy as installing one program on your PC, going to a website, use a search function like google, and clicking on a link. You can't tell me there are people who are to supid for that (well, ok, there might be some people who are, but for the overwhelming majority, this shouldn't pose a great challenge at all). Or even if they're not too aware of all this, there's surely someone in their vicinity who is. It would then becomes as easy as clicking on a bookmark, performing the search and clicking the link. There is more involved than you think. Perhaps the difference is related to the two countries we live in, but here, at least, pirating stuff (especially bigger things like movies) does require a little bit of computer savvy.
If you're incapable of doing that, well, why the fuck do you have a PC to begin with? For Facebook, of course. JonLove your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Wait, what's preventing you guys from installing a bittorrent client, going to the pirate bay and clicking on "get torrent"? There's nothing that is preventing us from doing this over here. And that's more difficult than you might think. JonLove your enemies!
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