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[Fredward]

Whereas the Major-General's Song ("I am the very model of a modern Major-General...") is from Penzance.

[Büge]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoR8E9TOCJY

[Pacobird]

However, I do think it should be treated as per the market value of the copyrighted material, with appropriate criminal sentencing.  If you've got thousands of dollars worth of pirated media, you should be treated like somebody who stole a car.

But at the end of the day when a car is stolen it is no longer in the hands of the person who had it.  They can no longer reap the benefits vis-a-vis having a car, whether for sale or personal use.  When a file is downloaded, the owner still has the content to sale or disperse as they see fit.


Also, the reason I (at least) hate DRM is that it is the companies way of saying "You do not own this product you just bought".  They deny me my right to enjoy the file as I see fit, while insisting on their right to stop me from using it should they dislike what I do with it.

So you can just give the car back and avoid prosecution?

Also, they treat you like you do not own the song you just bought because you in fact do not own it, just like you don't suddenly own the entire Beatles back catalog the moment you buy a Greatest Hits album.

Well, when you're being accused of a specific crime that has the taking and deprivation of use as an element, it's a pretty significant distinction.

Please direct me to any theft/larceny statutes that explicitly involve deprivation of use.  I know at least Michigan and California do not.

EDIT: Arizona does, but "withholding" is not an essential element of the crime.

[Mongrel]

Well, in all fairness, making a distinction about deprivation of use didn't matter in the past because this was implicit in any theft of physical objects.

The best pre-digital analogy for pure information theft are cases like that of an international spy, who copies documents (and therefore steals information) without stealing the originals*. But what really has little resemblance to modern copyright issues.

However, it is useful to bring that odd comparison up, because it deals with privileged information. The act of spying was considered such a dastardly crime, because the the spy was gaining access to privileged information - i.e. secrets. Secrets upon which lives depended in many cases.

Most of the root of the conflict surrounding DRM is whether or not the information is free or privileged. The consumer wants to believe that the information is free, as it has little to no value to the state or society and (for the most part) consists of artistic works, which are traditionally non-priviledged (in principle anyway) and are for the public good. The copyright holder on the other hand feels that the money they have invested and the risks they have assumed make their wares de facto privileged information, subject to their full control. In fact a scheme of 'renting' media, or pay-for-play is what they theoretically would have wanted all along (ironically regressing us back to the jukebox). The tragicomedy here is that instead of a civil dialogue about the modern value of infinitely reproducible information, the copyright holders have repeatedly tried to position their information as not just privileged information, but privileged information equal in sensitivity to those same state secrets, necessitating massive and brutal enforcement all out of proportion to any real damages.

So uh, my pointless bizarre ramble aside, I don't know who's 'right', but I always side with the little fellow because the big fellow can buy all the allies they want and I'm a no-good troll.

*_{Unless of course the spy was an idiot.}

[Pacobird]

Most of the root of the conflict surrounding DRM is whether or not the information is free or privileged. The consumer wants to believe that the information is free, as it has little to no value to the state or society and (for the most part) consists of artistic works, which are traditionally non-priviledged (in principle anyway) and are for the public good.

Do you think trade secrets should be privileged?  Like, for the ur-example, doesn't Coke have a right to make sure nobody else learns and can reproduce their recipe?

ps: the penalty for infringement has been 150 grand per act of infringement for decades.  The RIAA does not make these numbers out of whole cloth.

[Mongrel]

Trade secrets is debateable, but generally I agree they should be privileged as they have no value when not secret. Whereas a song is not devalued by a greater number of listners (unless you're a pretentious indie band).

Well, just because I stated the views of the two sides, does not mean I agree with either.

I mean, I like to point out everyone's errors after all. 

My point was that there is a scale to things - but that both sides are trying to position this as a black-and-white issue (though I think the RIAA et al bear more responsibility on this front). In reality, the correct stance is that while recreational-artistic stuff like music and movies can be considered non-privileged information in principle, they should probably be considered very lightly privileged for the practical sake of creator remuneration.

To clarify, I feel that non-privileged information should be completely free, and made available institutionally, i.e. the same way libraries work. In the real world this would almost certainly never work if applied to ALL artistic products. More importantly, we hardly need to reinvent the wheel. The existing model isn't completely broken, it just needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the digital world, where stuff like DRM-free iTunes is perhaps not perfect but decently reasonable.

Regarding the fines: Just because the RIAA didn't make up those numbers themselves, does not mean they are applying them in the spirit that they were intended. Such fines were designed around a smaller number of copyrights, with a much higher individual value in mind, where such fines are proportional (or perhaps even insufficient) to the damage. Or, more succinctly: Corporate patents are typically sold for more than a song _{(pun intentional)}. Of course the copyright and patent system as a whole has been subject to serious abuse and 'gaming of the system' for over two decades now.

***

A little history here... not really related to my response above.

Up until the advent of recordable media, there were two models of payment. An artist who put on a show of some kind (musician, actor) was paid for their performance, which was inextricably tied to direct compensation - if you were listening to a song, the artist was right there singing it to you. The performance could be duplicated, but was not fungible. In the case of the artist who created a tangible work (painter, sculptor), payment and ownership was tied to physical possession. In this case the work could not be duplicated (it could be 'copied', but... semantics), but was far more fungible.

Recordable media rewrote the rules by allowing us to compensate for both cases, meaning art of all types is (in theory) unlimited, as fungible art can now be duplicated and duplicatable art is now fungible as well. In theory, this should make the artist redundant and devalue all art so as to make it worthless, but obviously that has not happened. Artists (and those who profit from artists) can still make a living (and then some). In fact recordable media largely drove the idea of artist-as-superstar. In an effect that predicted the later effects of the internet, the increased exposure granted by recordable media more than offset any idea that the artist was redundant.

The key parallel between regular consumer goods and artistic materials is that increased availability brings with it lower prices. Barring strange situations, that's basic economics. In the best cases, a producer is compensated for the lower prices by having a greatly expanded market, in the worst cases a producer continues to try and have their cake and eat it too and their business suffers for their stubbornness.

I think the RIAA & co have already suffered a massive self-inflicted hit when they refused to recognise Napster for what it was. Ever since then, a culture of entitlement and rebellion has developed that makes people more than happy to gleefully download as much material for free as they possibly can, so as to 'stick it to The Man' (and hey, full disclosure: I'm one of them). In the end this is terribly unhealthy for the market. I think that the correct price point for legal downloads is probably extremely low - fifty cents or even a quarter per song - so as to encourage massive downloading. Even at $1 per song, an album is still around $10. Well, free beats the hell out of that and the genie is out of the bottle so that's what you're competing with.

Mentally, you want to reach the point where people are doing what they do with free file-sharing: investigating artists they would never look at if they had to pay 'real money'. If I can download a whole DRM-free album for $5 or $2, listen to it once, pronounce it horrible, and delete it without giving it a second thought, then I think the industry will finally be able to compete - and win - against free.

I mean if you go all the way back, they very notion of playing a song without the artist is weird and unnatural, but we survived that transition and society worked out a generally beneficial scheme in the end. Leaving principles and theories of what 'should be' aside, I think that the 'spare change song' would be a solid plan with a fairly good chance of success and decent benefits for both sides.

But of course it would require everyone to be adult and honest about the whole situation.

[TA]

Well, when you're being accused of a specific crime that has the taking and deprivation of use as an element, it's a pretty significant distinction.

Please direct me to any theft/larceny statutes that explicitly involve deprivation of use.  I know at least Michigan and California do not.

... Common Law fucking Theft.  That's what the taking element is - exercising "dominion and control wholly inconsistent with the continued rights of the owner".  It requires "complete physical control by the offender so that there is a complete severance from the possession of the owner".  Hell, one of the other elements is "the intent to deprive the owner permanently of his property".  This is first-year shit.

[JDigital]

So you can just give the car back and avoid prosecution?

Actually, in the UK you can. Theft requires you to permanently deprive someone of their property. If you borrow a car with intent to return it, it's the lesser crime of taking without consent.

Copyright in the US comes from the US Constitution, which defines copyright as a temporary exclusive right granted to authors of works, in order to encourage the publication of more works. The idea is that if you write something people will buy, you should be able to publish that without fear that someone else will publish it without paying you royalties.

It's a very artificial construct and modern technology makes it very easy to overcome. You now have a million people making personal copies without money changing hands, and unless copyright is made criminal rather than civil case, and policed as such, you need to lay a million tiny lawsuits to recover those losses.

You can't stop it with DRM because that in itself is an artifical barrier and computing history shows that antipiracy methods are usually cracked in less time than they take to build.

[Pacobird]

... Common Law fucking Theft.  That's what the taking element is - exercising "dominion and control wholly inconsistent with the continued rights of the owner".  It requires "complete physical control by the offender so that there is a complete severance from the possession of the owner".  Hell, one of the other elements is "the intent to deprive the owner permanently of his property".  This is first-year shit.

Model Penal Code:

5. Section 155.05 of the Penal Law defines larceny:  "1. A person steals property and commits larceny when, with intent to deprive another of property or to appropriate the same to himself or to a third person, he wrongfully takes, obtains, or withholds such property from an owner thereof.  2. Larceny includes a wrongful taking, obtaining or withholding of another's property, with the intent prescribed in subdivision one of this section, committed in any of the following ways:  (a) By conduct heretofore defined or known as common law larceny by trespassory taking, common law larceny by trick, embezzlement, or obtaining property by false pretenses."

So,

1) a Trespassory taking of

2) another's property,

3) with the intent to appropriate the same to himself.

Maybe by second year, you'll learn what the word "or" means!


At any rate, I know what the definition of theft is and I know it only specifically applies to physical chattels.  I was illustrating a point: wrongs are not based on harm done, they are based on intent.  From a practical standpoint, the only reason to cry about infringement not actually being stealing because the law calls it something else is to justify it to yourself and take comfort in the fact that you didn't really steal that copy of Windows XP when you pirated it instead of paying the $300 market value.

So you can just give the car back and avoid prosecution?

Actually, in the UK you can. Theft requires you to permanently deprive someone of their property. If you borrow a car with intent to return it, it's the lesser crime of taking without consent.

I was not aware that in England, being prosecuted meant avoiding prosecution!

You can't stop it with DRM because that in itself is an artifical barrier and computing history shows that antipiracy methods are usually cracked in less time than they take to build.

Which is why we have these things called laws.  DRM is a means to stem the tide; it might not stop the major distributors but it will at least slow down the limewire frat boys.

[McDohl]

But of course it would require everyone to be adult and honest about the whole situation.

Obvious goes here

[Mongrel]

Here's another amusing history tale.

Do you know why the single greatest source of english-language films is located in the town of Hollywood out on the west coast, when at the time of it's founding there was literally sweet fuck all going on over there?

Because when films first came out - at the very beginning - Edison held most of the patents relating to movies and their projection. In order to avoid paying out onerous royalties on every single movie made, most of the nascent US movie industry left New York for a distant locale where they could avoid Edison's patent regime.

Does this mean Edison was an overbearing plutocrat bent on milking artists? Does it mean the founders of Hollywood were no more than a pack of fly-by-night petty thieves? I don't really care.

What's important is that Edison chose the bully route, and in the end he was left behind. What's important now is that you can't flee the RIAA & co by going to the other side of the country. Hell, you can't even get away throughout most of the western world. The distribution centres of the future will simply go where they are immune, the world hasn't shrunk so far that there are no safe havens remaining. The problem is that this means out of our hands and into a country more than happy to dance on the graves of the west. This time the US as a whole will suffer for the loss.

The recording and entertainment industries need to put their "principles" (ahaha) aside for a minute and do what all cartoonish evil empires are supposed to be experts in: embrace expediency over principle.

We're already halfway there anyway. At this point it might as well be closing the barn door after all the horses have left... but the sooner the attempt comes the better.

[Büge]

The key parallel between regular consumer goods and artistic materials is that increased availability brings with it lower prices. Barring strange situations, that's basic economics. In the best cases, a producer is compensated for the lower prices by having a greatly expanded market, in the worst cases a producer continues to try and have their cake and eat it too and their business suffers for their stubbornness.

But we're talking about goods which have, hypothetically, infinite reproducibility.

I can't help thinking what Walter Benjamin would say if he were observing the situation. I mean, he's a Marxist, so he'd probably be  over the reproductive qualities of digital media, but the fact that the power didn't lay in the hands of the workers would make him 

[Transportation]

While this (literally) legalistic argument is absolutely fascinating, it's ignoring the practical/moral implications of current copyright laws.

Contextless Observation: The whole copyright infringement vs. theft is just an arguing tool meant to show the difference in the morality of the two crimes using the "common" definitions to a laymen.

Considering the ludicrous amounts of bandwidth shown to be torrent traffic it should be quite clear these are a tad unenforceable. And considering the millions that would imprisoned/in debt if they were all caught, I'd say it'd be immoral as well. Especially since this is the entertainment industry we're about here.

Making comparisons to prohibition, turning it down a few orders of magnitude, is apt I'd say in a costs vs. benefits analysis.

tl;dr Digital rights need to be burned to the ground.

An aside:

At any rate, I know what the definition of theft is and I know it only specifically applies to physical chattels.  I was illustrating a point: wrongs are not based on harm done, they are based on intent.

Are you speaking legally here or is this a moral statement? Because I deny its validity so hard to most extents if it's the latter. And those I can usually juggle rather easily. But that's getting away from my main points and why this is an aside!

From a practical standpoint, the only reason to cry about infringement not actually being stealing because the law calls it something else is to justify it to yourself and take comfort in the fact that you didn't really steal that copy of Windows XP when you pirated it instead of paying the $300 market value.

In addition to the standard supply/demand curve argument questioning whether a person who downloaded it would've bought (or at that price for that matter), I was under the impression the bulk of piracy was related to entertainment, not actually useful software. Is this just a throwaway example or did you know of some study that contradicts this?

[Mongrel]

Werd 

Regarding that last bit, I think the Photoshop phenomenon might be worth looking at. In that rather comical version, Adobe charges upwards of four figures for some of its software. Partially as a result of this, Photoshop is estimated as being the most pirated program in the world*. Adobe's high prices are a way of compensating for this, forcing the much smaller number of users who cannot afford to be caught with pirated sofware (mostly corporate clients) to bear the burden of expense for 99% of the user base. of course, the other end of this scale is mass distribution, where the price is dropped so that it is accessible and affordable to all potential users.

As you might guess, the latter is by far my preferred option, but I can't help but wonder if the apparently absurd opposite extreme that Adobe subscribes to has any merit. Sort of a "that's so crazy it just might work!" approach? 

*_{I saw this figure over a year ago and cannot immediately produce a source, but it was credible when I saw it. Even if it's not true anymore (perhaps in 2nd or 3rd place), the example is still sufficient, I think.}

[Pacobird]

An aside:

At any rate, I know what the definition of theft is and I know it only specifically applies to physical chattels.  I was illustrating a point: wrongs are not based on harm done, they are based on intent.

Are you speaking legally here or is this a moral statement? Because I deny its validity so hard to most extents if it's the latter. And those I can usually juggle rather easily. But that's getting away from my main points and why this is an aside!

I would actually be very interested in debating this because 1) I meant the latter, and 2) though I do not get behind Kant 100%, that is a major underpinning of his theories and I think one of the stronger ones.  It's not enough to do the right thing; you have to do the right thing for the right reason in order to be a good person.

But you are correct in saying that would be an aside!  I would be fine with a thread where we yell at each other, though!

From a practical standpoint, the only reason to cry about infringement not actually being stealing because the law calls it something else is to justify it to yourself and take comfort in the fact that you didn't really steal that copy of Windows XP when you pirated it instead of paying the $300 market value.

In addition to the standard supply/demand curve argument questioning whether a person who downloaded it would've bought (or at that price for that matter), I was under the impression the bulk of piracy was related to entertainment, not actually useful software. Is this just a throwaway example or did you know of some study that contradicts this?

So you are okay with stealing things that have commercial value so long as you do not think they are "useful"?

[Transportation]

I would actually be very interested in debating this because 1) I meant the latter, and 2) though I do not get behind Kant 100%, that is a major underpinning of his theories and I think one of the stronger ones.  It's not enough to do the right thing; you have to do the right thing for the right reason in order to be a good person.

But you are correct in saying that would be an aside!  I would be fine with a thread where we yell at each other, though!

Always enjoyable, that.

In addition to the standard supply/demand curve argument questioning whether a person who downloaded it would've bought (or at that price for that matter), I was under the impression the bulk of piracy was related to entertainment, not actually useful software. Is this just a throwaway example or did you know of some study that contradicts this?

So you are okay with stealing things that have commercial value so long as you do not think they are "useful"?

I am more "okay" with it, yes. I person can do without their widescreen television than, say, their car. Or game consoles instead of their supply of medication. More so with a very limited money supply where it would be hard to replace the stolen item. Or dissuading someone from being a software programmer is more detrimental than an artist, for instance.

For a more generalized example the "serious" software market is needed for keeping the modern world running (medical machines, for starters) while music, films, or videogames could go poof and the world wouldn't implode. At worst there would be a recession. Just a basic utility analysis.

[Pacobird]

Funny; I think of it pretty much exactly the opposite.  Like, it's morally permissible to steal food to feed your family, but there is no imperative requiring copyrighted entertainment in particular to survive.  There's no motivation for taking it for your own enjoyment without paying I can see other than simple greed or entitlement.

[Detonator]

DRM is a means to stem the tide; it might not stop the major distributors but it will at least slow down the limewire frat boys.

Okay, there are fifty different related arguments being made in this thread.  The severity of lawsuits, the semantics of the crime, the moral considerations, etc. 

Right now I'm just focusing on whether DRM is a good idea or not.  You say DRM is a good thing because it "stems the tide".

The reason I don't agree with you is because I don't think DRM works at all.  In theory, it should prevent illegal sharing, but I cannot think of any circumstance in which DRM would prevent someone who wanted to illegally download something from doing so.

If you want to make the claim that DRM is effective, can you please show me some sort of evidence that DRM has "slowed down" illegal copying in any way?  I can understand the claim that it prevents casual copying between friends ("let me burn that for you"), but is there any evidence that this is a significant source of revenue loss for the copyright holder?

I don't want to take this part of the argument any further unless we come to an agreement on whether DRM "slows down" illegal copying.  Chances are we're not going to change anyone's mind, so I want to avoid arguing the finer points of DRM when there's a fundamental disagreement that will keep us from seeing things eye to eye.

And please... PLEASE don't tell me that "It must be working or else companies wouldn't continue spending so much money on it".  I want to see some data on the subject.

[Transportation]

Funny; I think of it pretty much exactly the opposite.  Like, it's morally permissible to steal food to feed your family, but there is no imperative requiring copyrighted entertainment in particular to survive.  There's no motivation for taking it for your own enjoyment without paying I can see other than simple greed or entitlement.

Well, there really isn't any moral imperative for entertainment to exist at all, or to profit from it for that matter. It's just not necessary. As such I don't really consider actions related to harming it that immoral to begin with.

I'm honestly at a loss for any real comparisons, but the "Information Revolution" making businesses and their business models obsolete is just how these things go, similar to craftsmen going out of business due to a similar mass distribution of products. Except this time the copying is a lot more blatant. It's inevitable, so I don't really have much sympathy for copyright holders trying to stem the tide with what, from what you're saying, legal but highly disproportionate punishments in my opinion. This makes them the "bad guy" in my eyes.

To bring back the prohibition analogy, I consider alcohol consumption bad and I doubt it would be difficult to find someone who has driven drunk by randomly pointing fingers at people.

But I don't go out of my way to condemn people who can't resist a moderate amount on occasion and thus making it socially acceptable. Forbidding it has been shown to have worse consequences then the benefits, similar to the futile and border-line draconian enforcement of digital rights.

In this analogy drunk driving would be the equivalent of selling copyrighted items. It's both embracing digital distribution (and thus hurting artists) but being regressive by trying to make money off it (thus missing the point of massive piracy). Orders of magnitude in differences, but still similar logic behind both.

Fake Edit: is this confusing yes/no?

[Mongrel]

You're good - it's pretty clear... up until the last paragraph. You totally lost me on that analogy.