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Why I'm a Pirate

ploum.net

161–170 of 527 posts

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#161
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If authors aren't getting their fair share of the proceeds, wouldn't that be a perfect opportunity for a competing media company to enter the market and crush all existing publishers?

Getting access to good content producers is the easy part of running a traditional media company. The challenges are about control of limited distribution and promotion channels. This is a vicious territory and a zero-sum game. This helps to explain why that space cultivates nasty people. The sort of person who would have no qualms about grinding an artist down as much as possible. There's an endless supply of naive,…

What are these "distribution and promotion channels" limited by?

What you're saying sounds to me like artists don't deserve to get a larger share because what they do simply isn't the most difficult part of actually making money.

At the end of the day it may just be a completely normal function of supply and demand. Many people can easily supply what mainstream radio stations play all day long.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#162
post #20

A lot of his arguments are centered around the music industry, but guess what: You can get a high quality, DRM free song with just one click for about $1 today. This makes his whole blog post sound like an uninformed, whiny rant.

Not for every artist and not in every country.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#163
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright infringement is not stealing. I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments: If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get…

"Copyright infringement is not stealing." Sure, let's have a very pedentic notion of stealing and keeping framing the debate around 'stealing'. OK... "taking something which isn't yours and/or you don't have permission to take". In most minds, that's the same as stealing, hence the standard use of the word 'stealing'. But substitute the phrase above for 'stealing' and, imo, it becomes harder to justify. Just because…

Is the content industry stealing from the public, too, by extending copyright to forever and a day?

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#164
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might make you feel better about it, but it really > doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something > of value Copyright infringement is not stealing. Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been…

> Copyright infringement is not stealing. No, it's more akin to various kinds of fraud. So that's OK then, I guess. > Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead). That is simply nonsense. Ev…

[deleted]

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point that the major industries are trying to get across is that copyright infringement is just like stealing. They're saying so quite explicitly whenever I go to the movie theater or rent a DVD. But copyright infringement is not stealing. You could make an argument about it if the period was still 14 years (i.e. the author has only 14 years to collect revenue from it, so if you want it either pay up or wait 14 y…

How does the length of which the copyright is applicable affect whether copyright infringement is stealing?

Because a copyrighted work is not actual property, even if they call it "intellectual property" today, but that's mostly a misnomer. A copyrighted work was supposed to return to the public domain and benefit the whole society, not just the creator, by using it and improving it.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just validated my point. Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.

My point is that a work that is just information , no matter how high quality, will be copied. There is no scarcity. Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case. Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least,…

OK, I think I understand where you're coming from now.

Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways.

Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past.

Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince.

A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though.

Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough".

There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk.

Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense.

Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in.

These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities:

1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do).

2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough").

3. Fail.

None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do because they created it. As much as they have ownership over their music, you have the god given right not to buy it.

Well then they have a god given right to not digitalize it.

You're right but do you really want to return to the 90s when CDs cost $20 each and you had to carry around a 100 CDs instead of an mp3 player? Or to the 80s when we used lo-fi tapes instead? The labels would love this.

It shouldn't be required of just the RIAA to use technology properly but everyone. If someone makes music you like, and they're not attempting to rob, respect them. $1 is not much for a song you enjoy.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#168

This is a series of pretty poor arguments. The author seems to be looking for reasons to justify their own piracy and conflates anger at the approach of the "copyright industry" with infringement upon peoples' rights. One of the final lines of the article, in particular, is jarring: "If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off." It's fine to be angry about t…

> you're stealing something of value that someone worked hard to produce.

How is it stealing if they can still have that something?

You compose a song. I copy that song. You still have that song. If I'd taken away a recorder with your only master copy of it, then I would have stolen it.

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#169
post #103
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright infringement is not stealing. I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments: If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get…

If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it. In the end, it always boils down to pirates being spoiled. People never pirate to make ends meet. There is no digital content that is essential to anyone's life. People pirate because they want to be entertained but they don't want to pay for it.

> they have no right to enjoy it.

Why? Where did that right comes from. Who legislates enjoyment? Or are you saying it is a moral law?

Re: Why I'm a Pirate

#170
Those of you who continually refer to piracy as stealing are muddying the waters. I agree that it is morally wrong to download copyrighted works without paying for them, but whenever someone uses the word theft, I switch off.

It is akin to borrowing a book and then scanning it and using OCR to make an ebook before it is returned to the owner. Or ripping a friend's CD. I don't think a reasonable person would describe this as stealing. This is exactly what file sharing is, except that the scanning/ripping has already been done.

By insisting that this is "stealing" you will alienate some people who might be open to persuasion and to changing their behaviour. They know that they have not deprived the owner of it's use and that they have not stolen anything.

Stop talking about stealing, it's lazy

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