As I understand it, most films don't make a profit anyway. People continue to make films because people like to produce art. With less of a profit incentive, of course, we may see less big budget Hollywood style films, since it will be harder to get investment from people only seeing it as a money making vehicle.
Most big budget Hollywood movies do make a profit still. It may not be as big as it once was, but it's more than enough to cover the cost of production and advertising and still make a profit.
The issue is that the RIAA and the MPAA claim that every song, movie, or TV show downloaded is lost income, which is crap. If I'm not willing to pay $30 for a CD from some new artist, I may download it to try it, but if downloading were not available, I still would not buy it because it wasn't worth $30 to me.
What I have found, however, is that I'm willing to spend the time downloading a new artist's songs, and if its good, I may decide to go out and buy the next CD, or maybe buy tickets to the concert, or something. So really, by me downloading an album, the industry has actually made more money than they would have.
It is also a great marketing tool for new artists. They can post their music, or book, or low-budget film to the internet, build up a following, and begin to make money on it. This, of course, also pisses off the RIAA, MPAA and the labels because its money that is being made without filtering through them first.
The problem with SOPA/PIPA from the outset was the lack of due process. A corporation could shut down almost any site they wanted to without due process. It was a case where the blocked site would have to prove their innocence instead of having to be proven guilty.
A Slate article yesterday hit the nail on the head. The author made an analogy to basketball where blowing the whistle on every single foul would ruin the game. Instead, they blow the whistle on enough fouls to keep them from getting out of hand. SOPA/PIPA went too far. It is an attempt to get rid of all piracy in a very heavy handed manner.
I think corporations do deserve some pathway for protecting their copyrights. It would be refreshing to see leaders from the entertainment industry and internet communities work together to find a solution that works for everybody.
Here's a video on the matter, that I found very enlightening:
My thoughts:
I have questioned the "rights" of corporations to own any IP for some time now. The day I was made aware of this was during an Iron Maiden concert some years back (can't remember which tour it was, it was to promote a new CD of theirs though). During the show, Bruce Dickinson (singer) gave a speech about how they had been working very hard the past year to bring out an album, and that was about to be released. What he said next however, kinda stunned me at the time he said (paraphrasing): "I know a lot of you will download this album, and to those of you who will do so, and to those of you who aren't I say this: Do it! Download it as much as you like, share it with all your friends, do with it whatever you like. However, promise me one thing. If you like it, and if you think it is a good album, please also buy it. Better yet, buy tickets to our shows, because what we really like is seeing you guys out here going crazy with us."
I think he meant that they made more money from people going to see their shows, than they did from selling cd's. I later found out this was the case anyway. And this made me wonder. What right do these corporations have to the money that should go to the artists instead? Sure, if they invested in the band, helped them along, they should see that money returned, with a fee for the risk they took, but all those billions of dollars? No fucking way.
In short, "intelectual property" isn't actually intellectual property, it's corporations trying to make billions, when they should be content with making millions, instead.
The issue is that once someone makes their art public, they have made it public. It has become a part of the community and its culture.
If people want to restrict access to their work only to people who pay, then there are simple ways to make that a reality (distributing contracts, restricting performances to certain physical locations, etc.).
But people are wanting their work to be both public and for-profit, a ridiculous contradiction that can only be supported by excessive government involvement infringing on public rights.
And if this weren't silly enough, the 'people' largely involved in wanting such contradictions aren't the artists themselves, but the immensely wealthy and profitable agencies that represent them. These laws have nothing to do with protecting artists and entertainers; they are solely designed for enriching fat men in poorly-tailored suits.
I think he meant that they made more money from people going to see their shows, than they did from selling cd's. I later found out this was the case anyway. And this made me wonder. What right do these corporations have to the money that should go to the artists instead? Sure, if they invested in the band, helped them along, they should see that money returned, with a fee for the risk they took, but all those billions of dollars? No fucking way.
It can definitely depend. Sometimes it's the corporations that are solely responsible for the 'art' created (boy bands anyone?) while the 'entertainers' are little more than slightly-talented actors reading a script; their product of such low value that only millions upon millions of dollars worth of advertising and marketing can succeed in popularizing it.
And in today's age, real artists are rarely ever heard from.
But that only speaks to how the entertainment industry is all industry and no entertainment. And why crap like SOPA/PIPA is all about making money and not about helping artists. Jon
...has nothing at all to do with intellectual property. Whether a person disagrees or agrees with the MPAA or RIAA or Anonymous regarding copyright, SOPA/PIPA are bad legislation. They were written by people who have no idea how the internet actually works, and these laws would almost certainly result in major interruptions for internet communication and commerce on a global scale while doing next to nothing against a copyright violator.
You can literally force the top-level DNS servers to de-list an entire provider (which can host many thousands of sites) within 6 days for a single item on a single site which only may constitute infringement. It doesn't even have to be a legitimate claim.
I can, for instance, file papers to the court (any court, the laws don't specify which, so I can choose one that's really, really busy and won't even look at the claim for months) and to the host, network provider, domain registrar, or top-level DNS service asserting that Fox News illegally used copyrighted material (whether the claim is true or false). Within 6 days, before the courts even check to see if I filled out the paperwork correctly, Fox News (and potentially the entire network subnet that hosts them, which can include thousands of other sites not related to Fox) would be taken down, completely inaccessible until the court examines the filing (possibly months later) and determines it to lack merit. I can do this to any site. All I have to do is find some copyrighted content or just a link to copyrighted content that may or may not have used with permission on any site Fox owns.
The takedowns are global in effect, regardless of the laws of other nations.
The result will be a fragmentation of the internet, as other nations isolate their own DNS servers from the US. Among other things.
Very few things pose a real existential threat to the internet, which was designed as a network capable of surviving a nuclear attack...but SOPA and PIPA pose exactly that. This is the equivalent of giving the police the authority to lock up an entire city if a single individual allegedly breaks a law, before any sort of trial. It's not about copyright, it's about badly worded legislation that bypasses due process and would unnecessarily damage free speech on top of providing an easy avenue for economic destruction.
If these laws pass, Anonymous could (and likely would, in protest) create an economic disruption that would finish what the 2008 Great Recession started...and it wouldn't even be illegal.
And of course there are still no actual penalties for the copyright violators. Websites get taken down...but nobody goes to jail, nobody gets a trial. I could post a thousand songs and movies on a site, and my site could get taken down, and I could be back up and running on a different IP and different provider with a different domain name with a few hundred bucks and a few hours of time, while Amazon.com and every site they host (only a few hundred thousand domains) gets shut down for my infringement, I don't get fined or sued or arrested.
SOPA and PIPA both fail, utterly and completely, to accomplish even their stated goals, and are so wrought with potential for abuse that they create a real and immanent threat to the internet as a global communications medium, and therefore a threat to global economic security.
This is an excellent description in mostly plain language of how these asinine laws function, and why any representative who supports them should be tarred, feathered, and run out of town.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
What no one seems to want to ask, detractors of the legislation included, is whether 'intellectual property' is something that actually needs to be protected, or, indeed, something that even exists at all.
of course it is real.
why don't you ask KFC what the "secret recipe" is? they will say it's our intellectual property, and not show you.
I don't know how you can ask if something that does exist, exists?
I don't know how you can ask if something that does exist, exists?
The point I'm trying to make, of course, is that 'intellectual property' isn't property in the sense that real things are property, and as such the government should have no involvement in protecting people's 'rights' to keep their intellectual property. If people want to share their work, they share their work, and accept all the consequences that result; if people don't want to share their work, then they can just keep it all in their head.
If KFC has a secret it doesn't want to share, then they can simply not share it. But if they tell the world and then except to be able to sue everyone who uses it frying up their own chicken, they should be laughed out of court, not rewarded handsomely.
why don't you ask KFC what the "secret recipe" is? they will say it's our intellectual property, and not show you.
Uh, no, KFC's not-so-secret recipe is a trade secret, not a copyrightable IP.
There's no such legal thing as "intellectual property", and the Constitution specifically states that copyrights and patents are meant to be limited - not to defend "intellectual property", but to give content creators and patent-holders a time-limited monopoly to recoup the costs of investment and development in their ideas.
The time limit is what disproves the entire existence of "intellectual property." What other kind of "property" exists that, after a certain time limit, belongs to the public? When you create an idea, it doesn't belong to you. That's what the Constitution says. When you create an idea it belongs to everybody, and then you are granted by the public a time-limited monopoly from which to profit from it.
The notion of property, where you create something and you're able to control its disposition forever until you sell it, is one that is popular with a small number of people who have inherited the rights to profitable works, but it's not the legal reality in the US or in any other country. There's no such thing as "intellectual property" because you cannot own an idea. How on Earth could you?
as such the government should have no involvement in protecting people's 'rights' to keep their intellectual property.
I'm going to disagree with you just a little bit; I think we do benefit as a society when the people who invest in the development of new technologies are granted a limited-time monopoly from which to profit from it. The purpose of copyright and patents, as specified in the US Constitution, is to foster development in the arts and sciences.
That said, ideas that require little to no expensive capital to develop - software, for instance, or business plans - shouldn't be subject to either patent or copyright. There's no justification for Amazon to be able to have patented "clicking on one button to order something on the Internet." That doesn't foster either art or science; it simply distorts the marketplace and sets up barriers to competition.
The continual extension of copyright law (for instance, the Sonny Bono Act) is an absurdity, not least of which is the Supreme Court's justification for allowing it - an infinite number of finite extensions of copyright protection, supposedly, wouldn't violate Congress's requirement to only allow limited-time copyright.
The time limit is what disproves the entire existence of "intellectual property." What other kind of "property" exists that, after a certain time limit, belongs to the public? When you create an idea, it doesn't belong to you. That's what the Constitution says. When you create an idea it belongs to everybody, and then you are granted by the public a time-limited monopoly from which to profit from it.
Before I address the above, and in the interest of full disclosure, I am an intellectual property lawyer. I'm sure that in some eyes that means I am "the man". But nothing could be farther from the truth. I am not currently enaged in or seeking to engage in protecting ideas for corporations. FWIW I am among the large number of people who think SOPA and PIPA are bad policy.
Whether or not we as a society believe that it is worthwhile to protect intellectual property is one question. But the above quoted argument is completely specious in my opinion.
Intellectual property is given its name because the laws that protect developed ideas (such as trademarks, patents, copyrights and trade secrets) provide a set of rights that are analogous to those associated with real property (land). Like real property, the rights associated with intellectual property can be owned, inherited, transfered, registered with the government, etc. The sticks in the bundle of rights associated with real property can be subdivided and separately transfered, as can the rights associated with patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
The rights are not identical to those associated with property and the implications to society are not identical. When we find differences, that simply means that the analogy has broken down. But all analogies break down at some point.
Other reasons why, in my opinion, it is a particularly bad argument to suggest that time-limited nature of the right to means intellectual property isn't really property:
1) Copyright last a real long time, well beyond the lifetime of the author, and the Supreme Court to date has found that the IP Clause of the Constitution does not prohibit Congress from periodically extending the lifetime of copyright making it effectively indefinite. Essentially nothing has entered the public domain due to the expiration of copyright since 1923. In fact a few things that have fallen into the public domain have been clawed back into corporate hands.
2) Some real property rights can be time limited at the discretion of the transferee, or by exercise of law.
3) Trademarks and trade secret protection are not time limited.
4) The duration of patents and copyright is fixed by statute, with the Constitution placing no limits other than not infinite on their duration. Nothing prevents other countries from having indefinite duration copyrights other than the possiblility of revolution.
5) Most of the people in this thread would raise hell if patents and copyright were made more "property like" by being of indefinite duration.
but to give content creators and patent-holders a time-limited monopoly to recoup the costs of investment and development in their ideas.
Actually, the constitution merely says that we grant the right in order to promote the arts and sciences. There is no explicit indication whatsoever of what that level of encouragement is meant to be. But surely it as at least enough to recoup investment.
We could suggest that historically the length of copyright was much longer. But we might also note that historically, patents were granted as special favors for non-novel ideas.
While there is a legitimate argument about whether patents and copyrights are beneficial to society. Patents have both a progress and an anti-progress effect, with some of the analysis being quite complex. For example patents do cause people to invent new technologies to work around a patent. But the arguments I see in this thread, and I'm certainly not suggesting that crashfrog's are the worst in this respect, are primarily the same kinds of arguments that Louie uses when he uses his five-finger discount at Walmart.
Maybe artists would continue to generate art without obscene profits, but I highly doubt that anyone would be making 100 million dollar movies like Lethal Weapon 18 if there were no financial incentive to do so. Perhaps some view that as a good thing.
Also because intellectual "property" is an analogy, arguments can be made that IP need not be treated exactly as real property. For example, a court will almost always allow a land owner to kick squatters off of his property, but a court might not force a patent infringer to cease infringing and might instead require that patent holder to license the patented invention.
Uh, no, KFC's not-so-secret recipe is a trade secret, not a copyrightable IP.
When a discussion talks about intellectual property as one thing, quite often the discussion is going to be quite muddled. Generally speaking intellectual property encompasses a number of areas of law including copyright, patents, trade secrets, trademarks. Some people lump in rights to publicity in with those things. But the laws regarding the various types of intellectual property are completely different, and the resulting problems are likewise diverse.
Okay, enough ranting...
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
And of course there are still no actual penalties for the copyright violators. Websites get taken down...but nobody goes to jail, nobody gets a trial. I could post a thousand songs and movies on a site, and my site could get taken down, and I could be back up and running on a different IP and different provider with a different domain name with a few hundred bucks and a few hours of time, while Amazon.com and every site they host (only a few hundred thousand domains) gets shut down for my infringement, I don't get fined or sued or arrested.
I agree with your entire post but I think this part is misleading. The gov't doesn't need SOPA/PIPA to go after the actual violators Apparently the Justice Department is very much interested in throwing the operators of Megaupload, just busted this week, into the slammer and then into the poor house. I highly doubt that the operators are going to be putting up a new site anyti,e soon.
I'll also note that the music industry did embark on a huge campaign to go after individual uploaders and that the campaign was a complete PR disaster. The bust of Megaupload could have been a similar disaster except that the operators include some slimy ex-cons.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
What protection do business plans get. Other than protection against obtaining them illegally, business plans have no protection at all. You might be prohibited from copying the actual plans, but there is no legal protection that would prevent you from operating a business according to the plan.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
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