101–110 of 527 posts
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"with infringement upon peoples' rights" People's rights are man made, so they are debatable.
That's one of my problems with his argument. The author seems to think he has a fundamental right to access the produce of media companies... but only on terms he finds reasonable, of course. As you say, rights are often malleable - and reevaluating and redefining them (from both sides of this debate) should be an ongoing process.
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> 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…
I'd argue that property exists because things (apples, cars, gym equipment) have limitations on their use. If I eat an apple, you can't. If you grow a crop on this property, you can't. While he uses this gym equipment, they can't.
Even in historical contexts where there has been no effective government (silk road, dark ages iceland), ideas of property have evolved that are strikingly consistent, because it extends from realities of the world.
As states developed, they came to give stronger definition to property law. But then people who were well-connected to government decided that it would be a good idea to extend these convenient powers to things which were not property, sometimes by falsely labeling them as property.
So it comes down to who has control over the language.
Is property a distinct idea, or is it just a bundle of whatever rights the government of the day declares it to be.
And if you choose the latter, if the government says that black is white, is it so?
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> 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. 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…
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…
And yes, property is a right, one of far greater importance to political liberty than is generally allowed. And intellectual property is property. The placement of economic activity _outside_ the direct control of the state prevents the state from entirely dominating the society.
Now, SOPA is a really bad bill, because DNS filtering is a free speech nightmare. If you make me choose between speech rights and property rights, I'm taking the speech right, it's the foundation of everything else. The willingness of show biz and its lackeys to mess with speech rights demonstrates a disturbing greed and / or ignorance.
But that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's a complicated world, and technology is revising the everyday realization of our rights and responsibilities. We aren't going to work our way through that with a black-and-white simplification of the debates.
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> When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio. > It is all about scarcity. Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requir…
Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon. You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship. Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until bra…
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.
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…
I downloaded a lot when I was a student, when I began to work I decided I did not have the "I'm poor" excuse any more and I began buying CDs of bands I like. I stopped buying CDs after I got my first DRMed one. I thought "ok, this is stupid, I don't want to be part of this any more".
Only recently I have discovered the real harm that copyright laws and lobbyists are doing to the society. They are criminalising sharing. Think a bit about it. We have to stand against them. Now there are copyright restrictions on SCIENCE papers. It is effectively a danger to our society.
Here in France a law was proposed to display on CDs price tag how much the artist receives when you buy a CD. It was voted down by lobbyists' minions. That alone says a lot.
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I believe ploum still lives in France and in France when you buy a usb sticks, blank CDs and hard drives, you have to pay a "private copy tax" that can be in the tens of euros. So even if he ignores it, he is still paying them money because media companies can't adjust or accept that they're doing it wrong.
So, does this tax then mean that I can pirate songs/movies? After all, I have already paid for them (through the tax). (Fiction, I know, but one can dream...)
No, it's not fiction. I live in Spain and we have a similar tax. It taxes private copys, which are defined as
1. The work must be publicly available.
2. It must be done by a physic person (as opposed to an organization)
3. For private use, i.e. not broadcasting to an open audience allowed (but I can play it in my house with my friends).
4. Access to the work must have been obtained legally. 5. Must be non-profit.
6. The receiver of the copy cannot be a collective. So I can buy a CD and make a copy to all of my friends. They can do the same, and so on (a copy of a legal bought CD is legal).
According to some experts, P2P falls into a gray area, or it used to before they changed the law. I'm sure they will refine it progressively, but I won't stop downloading while I pay my copy tax for USB STICKS, BLANK CDs & DVDs, MP3 PLAYERS, HDDs AND EVENT PRINTERS AND PAPER.
Anyway the general attorney throw a paper stating that downloaders shouldn't be prosecuted.
One time, years ago, some members of an internet freedom organization, got a laptop with WIFI and, after calling the police to inform them of the fact, they mounted a table in the street and downloaded copyrighted works, offering free copys to whomever passed near, to show that it's legal.
There is an exception, however: Software is not covered under the private copy, so it would be illegal to copy software (being myself a developer, I have never undertood the differentiation).
The funniest part is that this tax is directly collected by private entities (our *AA counterpart), which have in the higher seats crappy artists which decide how to share the collected money (i.e. between themselves and their dearest friends). Some of them, like Alejandro Sanz, are arguably very crappy, but at least they are artists (for some definition of the word). But some others, like Teddy Bautista (ex president, now convict for different forms of stealing) or Ramoncín, AFAIK haven't composed or sung a song in the last decades.
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OK, how would you feel if the person who owned your apartment before you came in with a key he still had while you were out and sat in your bedroom in the dark (not using power) playing with himself? You're not using your flat, it's there anyway, you've not lost anything, nothing has been broken or damaged, he's gone before you're back so it's fine right?
This is more a question of privacy than of "stealing"/"not paying". In a world where privacy didn't exist (i.e. there would be no "reasonable expectations of privacy", I wouldn't mind. Let's use another example. I order food, but don't eat all I get. If you will eat it, I would be very glad, as it wouldn't go to waste.
After all, at the time they created it the legal and commercial framework, as well as the social norms, said that they could expect payment from anyone who consumed their work.
Why are you allowed to override their expectations yet someone using your property without your permission isn't allowed to override yours?
I used to be this guy, i would pirate software, music, tv shows, films, games etc. I did it mainly because it was easy. Innovation has changed my ways, not completely, but mostly. I no longer pirate music, ive paid for spotify for over 2 years now, i get music wherever i want on any device and its great, i wish they had metallica and acdc but theres youtube for that. I no longer pirate software, linux got good at "ju…
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Here's a history of copyright law: - Copyright Act of 1790 - established U.S. copyright with term of 14 years with 14-year renewal - Copyright Act of 1831 - extended the term to 28 years with 14-year renewal - Copyright Act of 1909 - extended term to 28 years with 28-year renewal - Copyright Act of 1976 - extended term to either 75 years or life of author plus 50 years - Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 removed the requ…
Again, not really saying anything about the "right" or "wrong" aspects, but continually using the word "stealing" in the debate, then debunking it by comparing it to a car, is, at best, a strawman argument. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a better/easier one word description people can use (for soundbiteness) that adequately gets the point across that the major industries are trying to get across.
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 years, which is doable). But that's not the case.