21–30 of 103 posts
So I'll assume he's consistent in his moral principles once the check clears.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm not sitting here defending anything. the other 10% doesn't factor into any valuation judgment or right/wrong analysis, since i didn't make one. i'm just pointing out facts and pointing out that the concept of digital piracy does not directly equate to the legal definition of theft. maybe they're in the same order or family, but they're not the same genus or species. and i'm also, apparently, making up statistics.
I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".
what if i made the assertion that, in addition, 10% of people who pirated something will also legally purchase the item they pirated?
I think we all know piracy is not theft. It's robbery and murder at sea. Infringement is not theft either as best I can tell. But ask a lawyer if the question pertains to your specific situation.
Piracy is people in boats killing other people and stealing their stuff. What about software piracy? As far as I know, pirates use guns and boats, not software.
What people are talking about when they say "software piracy" is "sharing".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm not sitting here defending anything. the other 10% doesn't factor into any valuation judgment or right/wrong analysis, since i didn't make one. i'm just pointing out facts and pointing out that the concept of digital piracy does not directly equate to the legal definition of theft. maybe they're in the same order or family, but they're not the same genus or species. and i'm also, apparently, making up statistics.
I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".
Piracy steals income infrequently at best.
The movie theater has costs associated with the playing of said movie. It pays employees, cashiers, ushers, cleaners, licensing fees, operators... etc etc... These costs are covered by the revenue from said ticket purchase. On the other hand, when a pirated copy is made, there is absolutely no ADDITIONAL cost to the content's creator(s). Actually, people typically use their own resources (time especially) to reproduce these works.
As previously stated, this new medium needs new rules and new ways to participate.
Besides, last time I checked the people complaining the loudest about piracy benefit the most from it.
"Piracy" is just as inappropriate and ridiculous as "theft" as a term to describe illegal copying or copyright infringement. Call it what it is, "illegal copying." It fits its own class, not theft of hard goods on land or piracy on the high seas. "Arggg, what seas you be sailing, matey?" How did the word "piracy" ever get attributed to this? Just to make it more sensational, more evil ?
> A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket. Last I heard, you don't get sued/fined thousands of dollars for sneaking into a movie theater....
People need to stop thinking of piracy as theft or not theft. It's a digitally reproducible item which makes traditional concepts of property obsolete and it's about time the law and the record industry started coming up with terms which match this status. Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing. The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and y…
A better example would be a company that invested a huge amount of money into creating the perfect strain of corn that allowed farmers to get 10 times as much corn per acre, solving the shortage caused by ethanol production. They sold this corn to a few farmers, who then grew a lot of it and gave it away for free to others. The original company never recouped their investment, ran out of money since no one would invest, and shut its doors in the middle of inventing a new kind of wheat that would also solve world hunger.
The other farmers never would pay for the better corn, they already had corn, why pay for the better kind if they could get it for free? Right?
Wrong, the better corn would have eventually forced the other farmers into buying it to be competitive, and the company could have recouped its investment and created better wheat, better apples, etc. Just because something doesn't have a variable cost, doesn't mean it didn't have a fixed cost to start with.
People need to stop thinking of piracy as theft or not theft. It's a digitally reproducible item which makes traditional concepts of property obsolete and it's about time the law and the record industry started coming up with terms which match this status. Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing. The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and y…
"The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and you sell bread. One day it starts raining bread, and people pick up their bread from the street rather than pay for yours. It sucks for you that you aren't getting money from your bread, but how can you blame people for what they're doing?" Inaccurate analogy. The baker played no part in making it rain bread. Software developers and other producers of content…
Another lame argument I hear is that all IP is essentially some number, and since you can't copyright a number, there is no such thing as IP.
Representation is arbitrary. IP laws identify "intellectual property" by representation. IP laws are not adapting, and they aren't able to adapt. The situation is hopeless and unenforceable: encrypt a DVD-rip or music file and then ask someone to identify it as such. It's impossible. We have to move beyond believing in copyright and IP laws because they are not enforceable.
So far, the BD+ scheme on Blu-Ray disks has had to be bypassed title by title, with Slysoft's breaks being corrected by Macrovision and Slysoft averaging 2.5 weeks on each of the refreshes. Nobody has come up with a scheme that completely defeats BD+. And BD+ is the first system of its kind; subsequent systems will be even more of a bitch to deal with. Add to that the fact that Slysoft has a really smart team that does almost nothing but this.
Take another example: DirecTV. The current DTV smartcards are unbroken, despite a ~7 year track record of breaks leading up to them.
Take another example: iTMS FairPlay. Last time I checked, there still isn't an equivalent break to JHymn, which does a direct decryption of audio files.
Take still another example, of protected media pathways on Windows kernels; currently shipping Intel hardware has chipset-enforceable RSA/SHA/AES locks on kernel integrity, which is something you want anyways, because without it you can't trust your kernel against malware.
And of course, all of this assumes that the goal is to keep people from copying at all. The industry could also solve the revocation problem, so that when copies are detected, players are shut off, accounts are closed, or people are sued. Ed Felten beat early watermarking attempts, but come on, do we really think watermarking is an intractable problem? It's the covert channel problem turned around to favor the defender; the media companies will win it.
I'm not making a moral stand here (although I really think that if you don't want to pay for DRM'd Miley Cyrus tracks, or pay for Miley Cyrus at all, you simply shouldn't give your money to Warner Music Group). But I object to the knee-jerk dogma that copy protection can't work. I think it can.