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The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

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Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#161
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just make it public domain? That's the default in a world without the right of ownership of code. Because if I do that I'm just unconditionally transferring wealth to corporations just as you claimed. No point in doing that while they still get to be "all rights reserved". It's only fair if nobody's protected. > How would you make money of it? It's not like you can sell it. By using it to do improve our own…

> Crowdfunding, patronage. I'm sure they'll figure it out if they have to So basically every creator would have to have a rich patron/be funded by a government/etc. who would obviously generally want to impose their own agendas? > Crowdfunding So unless an author already has a widespread reputation and a large group of people willing to support him he has no right to benefit from his works? Somebody who is completely…

> So basically every creator would have to have a rich patron/be funded by a government/etc. who would obviously generally want to impose their own agendas?

Already a thing. They even have an euphemism for it: "producer". Every time you watch a film or something, look for the producers in the credits. Those are the guys with the money.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#162
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not a reasonable compromise. Your proposal of 0 years in a nonstarter, and walking slightly back from that is still a nonstarter. On the contrary. Copyright itself is a non-starter. Remember, public domain is the natural state of information. They're the ones who need to convince us to respect whatever social contract they seek to impose. They are doing such a horrible job at it that it can be argued that co…

> Copyright itself is a non-starter. Sure...in your fantasy land. In the real world, it's not (because, as a sibling comment noted, it's the status quo and not even a very controversial one at that). > That's why 10 years is an exceptionally generous compromise. Being selfish but calling it "exceptionally generous" doesn't make it so. It just means you're deluded or a liar. >>> Remember, copyright exists at all becau…

> Sure...in your fantasy land. In the real world, it's not (because, as a sibling comment noted, it's the status quo and not even a very controversial one at that).

> deluded or a liar

LOL I'm deluded? You're the one who believes in owning numbers.

Let's talk about the real world then. In the real world, barely anybody even knows or cares what copyright even is. Copyright infringement is the norm. People infringe copyrights all day every day and they don't even realize they're doing it. They infringe copyright when they save pretty pictures off the internet, when they print screen Instagram posts because the app won't let them download the photos. They infringe copyright when they create funny memes and share them with friends. They infringe copyright when they listen to some illegally uploaded music on YouTube. Could even argue we infringed each other's copyrights when we quoted each other's posts. All of this is happening every single day at unprecedented scales and exactly zero people lose any sleep over it.

You see, in the real world, copyright is so irrelevant it barely even registers in people's minds. Copyright infringement is the custom and banning it is like banning alcohol consumption. This is the real status quo. Nobody really gives a shit about "creators", "authors" or whatever. People do what they can do and what they want to do. The world changing technology that is computers allows them to freely manipulate information so that's exactly what they do. Information is infinite, it's numbers. No amount of copyright will ever change that. You'd have to completely destroy computers to roll the world back to a state where copyright matters.

> All I was doing was show that you're confused and you don't really seem understand the implications of the arguments that you're making.

Only thing you've shown is you don't understand what you're talking about. We're talking about ownership of ideas, naturally infinite, intangible. You move the argument to the scarcity of the physical world and then compare copyright infringement to killing people.

The fact you even think you can "easily" kill someone is notable. Have you ever killed someone? Killing another human being fucks you up for life. Even when you're justified in doing so. Pulling the trigger on a weapon even in self defense has significant psychological costs. It gives people PTSD. You can find accounts of soldiers whose entire jobs were to use weapons to kill others -- it fucked them up for life. Militaries all over the world have to literally dehumanize the enemy in order to soften that blow to people's psyches because otherwise you'll get soldiers who have the enemies in their sights but are unable to pull the trigger.

Killing people is universally understood to be a terrible thing even when you're right. That you're even putting this in the same conceptual space as something so victimless as copyright infringement is straight up offensive. I'm honestly too angry to even argue coherently. Not a single person in this world loses any sleep over copyright infringement. Only lawyers even understand exactly what that even is.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity would be more than happy to make that effort if there was no risk of getting sued to oblivion for it. There's more than enough distributed storage capacity out there to hold it all. Copyright holders are the ones who are outright hostile to any and all preservation efforts, to the point preservation of culture is an argument for getting rid of copyright.

Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done. Oh, but you're only arguing against copyright so you can freely take others work without remuneration. IF you're a creator, and you believe that copyright shouldn't exist - everything you produce, please... put it in the public domain and see what happens.

> Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done.

Wrong. My house burns down, the book is gone. Your advice is worse than using RAID is as a backup solution.

Preservation requires multiple independent redundant copies widely distributed over large geographical areas, cryptographically verified. Surely you can see how that flies in the face of copyright, a legal mechanism to give authors a monopoly on the production of copies.

Truth is bittorrent did more for preservation of culture that copyright ever did. You could even quantify how well preserved the data was since you could count how many redundant copies were present in the swarm.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#164
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crowdfunding, patronage. I'm sure they'll figure it out if they have to So basically every creator would have to have a rich patron/be funded by a government/etc. who would obviously generally want to impose their own agendas? > Crowdfunding So unless an author already has a widespread reputation and a large group of people willing to support him he has no right to benefit from his works? Somebody who is completely…

But most of that happens already? That's how record labels and publishers do business. You are already living in that dark an intellectually subdued world. A few examples I remember: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-legal-war-over-disco-elysium-rea... https://kotaku.com/witcher-author-threatens-cd-projekt-red-w... https://www.dualshockers.com/nintendo-copyright-strikes-laws... Copyright is not in place to protect the auth…

> Copyright is not in place to protect the authors, but to protect the corporations that own the rights.

The system is not perfect, obviously. There are problems that need to be addressed. But I refuse to view the world in black and white terms

Copyright does protect the author or at least most authors to varying degrees. Just go around and ask any author whether they'd prefer the entire concept of copyright to be abolished because it's used to "protect the corporations"...

> You are already living in that dark an intellectually subdued world

And I'm certain it could get even darker with no copyright protections at all.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#165
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crowdfunding, patronage. I'm sure they'll figure it out if they have to So basically every creator would have to have a rich patron/be funded by a government/etc. who would obviously generally want to impose their own agendas? > Crowdfunding So unless an author already has a widespread reputation and a large group of people willing to support him he has no right to benefit from his works? Somebody who is completely…

> So basically every creator would have to have a rich patron/be funded by a government/etc. who would obviously generally want to impose their own agendas? Already a thing. They even have an euphemism for it: "producer". Every time you watch a film or something, look for the producers in the credits. Those are the guys with the money.

Generally their agenda is just to make more money. This is a relatively benign agenda and in certain cases allows (or used to anyway, not sure about nowadays...) authors a high degree of creative freedom.

If it's no longer possible to make any profitable movies whatsoever, just try to imagine what happens...

Well they managed to realize a couple of decent movies in the USSR so maybe the situation of 99% government or interest group funded cinema and TV production won't be utterly terrible just very miserable.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done. Oh, but you're only arguing against copyright so you can freely take others work without remuneration. IF you're a creator, and you believe that copyright shouldn't exist - everything you produce, please... put it in the public domain and see what happens.

> Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done. Wrong . My house burns down, the book is gone. Your advice is worse than using RAID is as a backup solution. Preservation requires multiple independent redundant copies widely distributed over large geographical areas, cryptographically verified. Surely you can see how that flies in the face of copyright, a legal mechanism to…

Cryptographically verified? How did we do it all these years?

And I would like a source for your claim regarding BitTorrent.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was the SaaS product pirated? I've always used that to refer to a delivery model where the software is centrally hosted. Was it that people were sharing their logins?

I assume it was locally hosted with some register/licensing thing. Eg Photoshop and IntelliJ are effectively SaaS but run on your computer.

Only if you twist the definition of SaaS into meaninglessness.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#168
post #50
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't put CD into your phone; but you can put MP3 on it. As Gaben said, "piracy is a service problem". Look at years; that's when portable music players; then smartphones; started to become popular Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen. If we had the ease of use of today's music streaming the dip would probably be much lower; but between the tech at the time and RIAA cockblocking anyone th…

Re: Gaben quote - While there are some grains of truth to the quote, I think it’s oversimplifying the problem. After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone. Continuing the game piracy line, game piracy is often a significantly worse service outside of the “free stuf…

> After all, Gaben’s primary product is essentially a DRM platform (one of the first online DRM platforms for that matter!), evidently he believes he can’t compete with piracy on service quality alone.

Steam DRM is entirely optional and not required to put the game on Steam. DRM is game developer choice, steam is just giving a (shitty, easily breakable) option.

> Take Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. You can buy a DRM free copy from GoG pretty easily… yet the torrents for it are still quite active from what I can see.

Well, some people won't start paying even if they have means. And some will not have enough money to ever say "okay I will actually buy game instead of putting it towards updating my rig". Question is really how many of those would be converted vs. just not play the game, especially now where there is plenty of F2P stuff, or insane value bundles or sales.

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#169
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't put CD into your phone; but you can put MP3 on it. As Gaben said, "piracy is a service problem". Look at years; that's when portable music players; then smartphones; started to become popular Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen. If we had the ease of use of today's music streaming the dip would probably be much lower; but between the tech at the time and RIAA cockblocking anyone th…

> Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen. Really? I've never thought so. Perhaps if you consider buying the CD as a major burden, which I don't get. Put CD in computer. Rip at your choice of bitrate. Listen. vs. Download pirating software. Search for song. Download song. Verify it's not a trojan for an executable or zip bomb, etc. Verify you got the full songs. Verify you got the actual son…

I never had that problem with pirating music, nor I ever got any virus out of torrented video games even thru my dumb teenager years

Re: The EU suppressed a 300-page study that found piracy doesn’t harm sales (2017)

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done. Wrong . My house burns down, the book is gone. Your advice is worse than using RAID is as a backup solution. Preservation requires multiple independent redundant copies widely distributed over large geographical areas, cryptographically verified. Surely you can see how that flies in the face of copyright, a legal mechanism to…

Cryptographically verified? How did we do it all these years? And I would like a source for your claim regarding BitTorrent.

> Cryptographically verified? How did we do it all these years?

Yeah, how did you? Data can get corrupted, you know. Things like hashing and error correction are essential.

> And I would like a source for your claim regarding BitTorrent.

Launch any torrent client. There will be an indicator of how many complete copies exist amongst the peers in the swarm. The higher the number, the more well preserved the data is. Really simple. It's also self-healing since you can check the data and fix errors by downloading the damaged blocks again.

Bittorrent is essentially the Linus Torvalds "real men publish things online so the whole world can mirror it" approach to backup and preservation. Shame copyright holders had to ruin it.

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