Summations Only

In fact, I don't have the right to publically perform, copy, or distribute an entirely original work set in Tolkien's Middle Earth, or including mentions of Hobbits. And that very much is a restriction on my free speech that none of you have yet addressed.

It depends on the fidelity of the description, now doesn't it? And whether or not it's a "performance in public" depends on how many people choose to listen to me.The idea that I have all the free speech I want just as long as nobody else is listening isn't very compelling. And I've noticed that you've been completely unresponsive to my points. Maybe you'd like to go back and actually grapple with the arguments put before you before you accuse me of ignoring yours. trust me, just as soon as you have something relevant to say, I'll address it. Currently we're in the part of the debate where I'm showing abundant evidence in order to get you to admit that there's even a problem, here. So far you've ignored all of it, or simply dismissed it by saying you "don't approve" of a particular assertion of copyright.Who gives a shit what you approve of, Nukes? You're not the arbiter of where copyright law is "rightfully" applied. Some blame has to be laid at the feet of the system that makes these abuses possible; all the more so when the system, apparently, views these abuses as "working as intended."

You don't seem to understand the difference between something you can get away with and something that is legal. The only difference between infringement that brings the wrath of the RIAA down on you and infringement that doesn't is whether you draw so much attention that they have no choice but to go after you.But I guess you're comfortable with the idea of your freedoms being completely circumscribed by whether or not a corporation determines that it's worth the lawsuit to make you stop. I'm not. But it did happen:

quote:

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Linda Gober slipped and was injured on the stairs when leaving an Applebee's Neighborhood Grill and Bar in Dayton. Her lawsuit was thrown out by the trial court, but the 2nd Ohio District Court of Appeals (Montgomery County) reinstated her claims based primarily on the testimony of an expert witness.
The expert testified that the concrete surface of the steps "was badly finished, resulting in depressions that allowed precipitation to accumulate or 'puddle' on the steps." The restaurant had brushed the snow to the sides of the steps to let persons pass, but the "probable source of the ice on the step where Gober fell was runoff from the melting of snow piled at the sides of the steps."
Had Applebee's left the snow untouched, in its "natural" condition, it probably would have escaped potential liability.

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http://www.clelaw.lib.oh.us/.../misc/FAQs/Budish_Shovel.htmlAnd, what? The system that allows rightsholders to make these absurd claims, treated as reasonable on their face by courts of law, deserves no blame? The system that allows rightsholders to make spurious lawsuits, knowing that the act of merely filing the suit forces their targets to settle? To the contrary, I've demonstrated that a world without copyright has little, if any, additional piracy to the one we have now. But what it does have is greater freedom and a much less inconvenient experience for consumers. Right up to the point where someone else asserts copyright on your work simply because you did not; now someone else controls the distribution of your work. Open-source software uses a legally-complicated series of licenses called "copyleft" to avoid this problem, but those have not yet been tested in the court. It may not actually be possible to release something into the public domain any more.

"Halfling", as it turns out, was also coined by Tolkien and is technically infringing, but the estate opted not to pursue the claim.Personally, I'd like my rights of free speech to rest on a little more than the benevolent neglect of rightsholders.

Well, ok, but I did give an example of a business that was sued because they made snow clearing efforts. Again, we may be talking about differences between the UK and the US. Well, we certainly have a litigious culture. Or, another way to think of that is, we have a culture where people are proactive about asserting their rights under the law.Which means we need to be very fucking careful about what rights we enshrine into law, because they're invariably going to be asserted in ways that are detrimental to society in the aggregate. Sometimes the benefit of the rights is worth it; sometimes, it isn't. It gets funded the same way it gets funded now - by people choosing to patronize the artists who produce work that they enjoy. I mean it's not like you can't now get a perfect digital copy of a movie the day of its release, for free. The world that proves that art can survive rampant piracy is the world we currently live in, where piracy is rampant and effectively unchecked, yet Hollywood continues to rake in billions every year.I've pointed this out several times but you have not yet responded. DRM and restrictive copyright law has done nothing to combat piracy, because even when enforcement isn't super-sketchy, you can always pirate from any one of a dozen nations that have no legal copyright whatsoever, or a dozen others that don't extend copyright to foreign works, or a dozen others that are theoretically signatories to our copyright treaties but in practice turn a blind eye to piracy in order to privilege their own native arts.So we already live in the world of untrammeled piracy, and yet there is no shortage of art or artists; Hollywood still makes Hollywood movies the Hollywood way, Justin Beiber's enriched himself on a career of copyright infringement, and so on. Despite the ready easy of piracy, people continue to believe that there's a moral obligation, or at the very least a self-interest, in patronizing the artists who produce work that they enjoy - even in spite of content creators' assembled attempts to punish them for doing so. In light of this it makes the most sense to assume that the elimination of copyright laws would increase revenues for content creators, not diminish them.

Well, let me see if I can break it down for you: somebody wants the latest Justin Bieber track, and because they like Bieber tracks and want there to be more of them, they pay BMI 99c for the track instead of getting it for free on the internet. Or maybe they already have it for free, decided they really liked it, so they pay the 99c and just don't bother to download the track. People who want the track but don't think it's worth 99c or don't care whether or not there ever are more Bieber tracks, just download it for free (but they were never going to pay for it, anyway.) Justin Bieber only stays in the business of making music if he's able to produce product that people want to pay 99c for. But that's the same as it is, now. Well, I'm not sure I understand. Are you a filmmaker or an investment banker? When I pay $9 to go see a film in the theater, in what sense is that an investment that I'm "getting back"? If you want to be in the business of investing people's money, what on Earth do movies have to do with it?Edited by crashfrog, : I can't believe I don't know the difference between 99 cents and .99 of one cent.

I don't know how people around you talk about movies, but it's certainly the case that people "describe" movie scenes by reciting the dialog to the best of their memory, usually like "so the one guy says ' It's a record we've been listening to and enjoying, Barry,' and the other guy says 'Well, that's unfortunate, because it sucks ass. '".In other words, people "describe" movies by, to varying degrees of fidelity, performing them. And you keep ignoring the point that it's only as a result of Beyonce's wealth that the suit is even going to get before a judge where it can be dismissed. If she had only the resources of a regular person, with little to no ability to afford the team of lawyers to repel this nuisance suit, she'd have little recourse but to settle regardless of the merits of the suit. As so many regular citizens have been forced to settle with the RIAA.Again, there needs to be some blame apportioned for a system that allows moneyed interests to coerce behavior simply by the threat of lawsuit; a system that assumes these spurious claims are reasonable until a judge determines otherwise. Until a judge rules - and frequently it never gets to that point - a spurious lawsuit is just as much a threat as a legitimate one. I'd be ok with that. That's a reasonable compromise between the selfish interests of content creators and the interest of the public as a whole. The system we have now is deeply, deeply lopsided against the public interest. I'm in favor of any movement in the balance-restoring direction.

Ok, that's a different question than you asked, though. The way you get your $40 million is by convincing enough people that the existence of your movie is worth $40 million dollars. For instance, you could convince 4.5 million people to each buy a $9 ticket. Or 2.25 million people to each buy two such tickets. And so on.It's worth pointing out that "convincing some number of people that the existence of your movie is worth $40 million" is the exact same problem you'd have in Hollywood today.

Why would people who want to patronize artists patronize a theater that doesn't patronize artists? And why would people who don't want to patronize artists pay for a ticket at all?I just don't see the issue. Maybe with theater operators who claim that they patronize artists but actually don't, but that would be fraud.

I think it's well-known that the RIAA is offering settlements that don't have legal merit; when they come to you and say "here's all the violations of the DMCA you're guilty of, here's the criminal and civil penalties you could face in court; here's the settlement we'll take from you to make it all go away" it's pretty well-established that this is without legal merit, since the RIAA doesn't have the statutory authority they claim to immunize you from prosecution under the DMCA. They know that if they request settlement amounts below the expected legal costs of a protracted courtroom battle, they can get most people to fold, anyway.It's extortion. Because the law makes everybody an "infringer!" You yourself described several use scenarios which you thought constituted reasonable "fair use", but which actually made you a criminal under the DMCA. Just about everybody is. Even ripping a CD to use in your iPod might run up against the anti-circumvention provision.

If it's not worth $9 to you, then sure, roll those dice. But it was also the sane thing to do to let someone else pay for Louis CK's comedy video and then download it from them. And sure, a lot of people did that.But a vast majority of people decided that Louis CK's work was worth patronizing, despite the fact that they did not have to. Over four million dollars, Tangle. You just can't argue with that. People overwhelmingly want to patronize the artists that they enjoy. They want to even if they can get it for free.If what you're saying is that nobody will enjoy Lethal Weapon 18 enough to patronize the artists involved, well fine, but then why should the movie even exist? I don't see how it is. Presumably the "money men" aren't going to settle for any less evidence than 4.5 million people, at least, willing to pay for the movie. Actually, in your case, 45 million people, since you're looking for a 10:1 ROI.Under the Kickstarter model, when you convince 4.5 million people that the movie is worth it, you've already got the money. Under your Hollywood model, you have the ten-times-as-hard problem of convincing 45 million people, and then when you have you still have to convince a bunch of other people to "invest."That's clearly a lot harder. Not only is the Kickstarter model more direct, it's easier. So, your position is that I can't be right, but even if I were, it wouldn't convince you. Wow, quite the fortress of invincible ignorance you've set up, there.

No, you're stuck in a dreamworld where piracy isn't unfettered now. That's what you keep ignoring, Tangle - that copyright law has erected precisely zero obstacles to piracy, yet movies continue to be made.How is that possible, under your position? It seems like you have an enormous unanswered question of how movies can even exist. Do you think that the average consumer of a movie can't now download any movie they want, for free, the day of release? You're just being naive.The only question, here, is whether content creators should be able to use the law to punish consumers. Can you, at last, explain why they should?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I never said it couldn't be. So what? But they can't currently protect their investment. You can find any movie on the internet as we speak. The largest markets in the world - the Asian markets - trade pirated copies of films freely, even for profit.Investments in movies are currently completely unprotected, yet investment in movies continues apace. Ending copyright law and restrictive DRM doesn't leave investments in movies any less protected; it simply ends the counterproductive practice of rightsholders choosing to punish their own customers out of misplaced paranoia.

But the draconian measures don't protect the investment, either. It doesn't "protect" anything at all to arrest people who operate DNS servers. It doesn't protect anything when I can't play my iTunes songs via my Xbox. What threat? 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. Why? If you're happy to pay for them, why would you stop? Here you are admitting that you want to patronize the artists that you enjoy, and you wonder why people would want to patronize the artists that they enjoy? Answer your own question, then. Why do you want to patronize the artists that you enjoy?

I don't think there's anything there to overlook, but I've already thought of that. The evidence is abundant that the civil and criminal penalties don't really deter downloading. So the people who don't download because it's illegal are largely expressing a moral preference, not responding to the disincentive of the penalties. And the people who are expressing their moral preference not to break a law would be just as likely to express a moral preference that artists they enjoy should be rewarded.