Any artists gone bust provably down to "piracy"? In fact many really awful "artists" make millions, seemingly supported by draconian acts of government. I mean, would some one like Rhianna be happy to see her fans potentially get fined or even jailed? Ironically if you fine people they have less cash to spend on these muppets.

Any concrete proof that "piracy" is actually costing them actual real money? Is there any proof that the majority of down-loaders would have bought the "art" in the first place? Its mostly grazing.

Or is it just that they want to make even more money? All those profits not quite enough?

OK, fair enough, capitalism is capitalism, so then cant they invest rather than using government to beat on their customers?

Why does government support failing business by using the law to do so? The law is government/public money, its just like pumping cash in to failing businesses. Its stealth socialism.

I'm sorry, this whole thing is absurd. Worse still its based on a fundamental lie.

The simple truth is that people will willingly pay good money for a product they value. Its that really not enough? It certainly was for Louis CK.

Here's a great piece by David Lowery, of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame, on how the Internet is impacting the music business: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-...

Why does that matter?

> Any artists gone bust provably down to "piracy"? In fact many really awful "artists" make millions, seemingly supported by draconian acts of government. I mean, would some one like Rhianna be happy to see her fans potentially get fined or even jailed? Ironically if you fine people they have less cash to spend on these muppets.

If Rihanna wanted people to have her music for free why doesn't she go down the pay what you want route? It's a business decision that she has made (or at least, sold the rights to make that decision to others through contracts and the like). If Rihanna didn't want her fans to be breaking the law by downloading her music illegally she would not make her music illegal to download. She would make it free.

> Any concrete proof that "piracy" is actually costing them actual real money? Is there any proof that the majority of down-loaders would have bought the "art" in the first place? Its mostly grazing.

Does there need to be? People are taking something for free, something someone is trying to sell and does not want to be taken for free. Surely that is enough for illegal sharing of music to be considered bad? If an artist wants their music to be free they would make it free.

> OK, fair enough, capitalism is capitalism, so then cant they invest rather than using government to beat on their customers?

huh? Please can you elaborate on what you mean by this. Are you suggesting that the media companies should either develop DRM that can't be broken, or that they should make their product attractive enough that it won't be stolen? If so, doesn't that argument extend to cars? BMW should make a BMW so attractive post purchase ("You can only start the car using finger prints!") that nobody would steal a BMW and if they don't make that the case then they deserve for the cars to be stolen?

> Why does government support failing business by using the law to do so? The law is government/public money, its just like pumping cash in to failing businesses. Its stealth socialism.

Huh, if a business has a product and people are taking that product without agreeing to the terms set out by the business that owns the rights to that product (eg: downloading a song for free when the business wants $0.99 to download a copy) shouldn't the government protect that? Just like if any business should expect to be able to control their product (within the confines of the law)?

> The simple truth is that people will willingly pay good money for a product they value. Its that really not enough? It certainly was for Louis CK.

I'm sorry but that's a laughably misguided statement. People pirate media because they don't want to pay for it. The evidence of this is EVERYWHERE, you included an example yourself: people pirated the Louis CK special[1][3]. People pirated "World Of Goo", a DRM free PC game that had ~90% piracy rates[2]. People pirate because they don't want to pay: the only way to prevent that is to include incredibly restrictive DRM (see: Steam) masked as some sort of "extra service"[3].

[1] https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/torrent/6878474/Louis_ck_-_Lo...

[2] http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

[3] Even Steam games (eg: L4D) have huge piracy rates and Steam is considered a fantastic service with excellent sales (L4D has been as low as $2): http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/torrent/7470070/Left_4_Dead_2-...

It matters because the economic argument is the only marginally justifiable motivation for the heavy handed enforcement of copyright over civil rights. And I'm being very generous in using the word "justifiable".

> People pirate media because they don't want to pay for it.

People pirate media because they understand they shouldn't have to pay for it. We pay for services rendered (Netflix) or goods delivered (DVD's). Everything else is either tax or extortion.

You know, passive phrases like "owning the rights" are so insidiously misleading. Nobody "owns rights", all that actually happens is that the rights of others get limited. That's how this convoluted artificial construct works.

No, I'm not denying that that leaves us with the original problem of stimulating the creation and distribution of original work.

But millions have woken up from the shared illusion of copyright, and no amount of enforcement, DRM or just incessantly repeating the words "stealing", "pirate" etcetera is going to put them back to sleep.

>>> People pirate media because they understand they shouldn't have to pay for it. We pay for services rendered (Netflix) or goods delivered (DVD's). Everything else is either tax or extortion.

I guess I just come at this from a different angle. I never really felt that I was entitled to media that I didn't produce myself. And that if I wanted that media, there is a price to pay for it. And that if you don't want the media, you don't pay a price for it.

Am I missing something here?

People instinctively feel paying for property and services is justified, but not for information and intellectual property is just a way of trying to make people think information is property. If I steal something from you, I must have deprived you of it; copying is not stealing.

The very notion of ownership stems from physical scarcity, the concept does not logically transfer to digital information.

In a world where your beliefs are supported by the courts, a creator's only means to ensure a revenue stream from their creations is to present them only in controlled physical environments free of digitizers.

I don't think that's a better world than the one where creators can expect revenue by selling their digitized creations.

Bullcrap. They'd just have to make their money in ways that do not depend on distribution of non-scarce goods. And they already do.

Musicians, for example, are performers. They have a service to sell. That's how many make their bucks. There's models like Kickstarter, where you pay upfront - for the act of creating, not for the eventual distribution (which is costless). Donations or patronage can be a valid source of income, too.

Your claim that we need to restrict access to a good that is inherently not scarce (and indeed, not depletable) for artists to make a living at all is a disingenuous lie and flies in the face of reality.

If the only way a creator can make money is by using law to create artificial scarcity, then whatever he's creating isn't deserving of pay; if it were, the market would value it without the fake scarcity imposed by law. There was a time when creators were paid to create, rather than for content distribution, we need to return to those times.

You are simply defending the status quote without understanding the critique against it.

Only because laws force us to, not because it's the proper market solution to the problem. And it has nothing to do with being digital; if you think it does, you don't understand the complaint. All information should be freely copyable. Whether it's photocopying a book, or burning a copy of a CD, I've deprived no one of anything because there is no natural scarcity of anything that is copyable and thus no justification for ownership claims of pure information. If I see a chair you have that I like, and I build a complete perfect replica of it, I've not taken anything from you, you have no natural claim of damage.

Sure you will retort with yes there will be content, but it will be cheap, crap content and say goodbye to the next Harry Potter, Chris Nolans and World of Warcrafts of the world.

Copyright has worked because even due to the ability to easily duplicate content (previously via Xerox), now via the net, content creators see it as a viable way to protect their time spent creating something and to (hopefully) reward their efforts.

Secondly, absent ip, they'd just make more but cheaper movies to target more niche markets; the blockbuster isn't really a great business model to begin with, it just works because law makes an artificial market for it. If the market can't naturally support the blockbuster, then they should go away. A world absent more Michael Bay flicks is a better world anyway.

No it isn't because there is zero demand for those types of movies, in fact there is a huge demand. It is because of copyright that they get the up front funding as the studios can be sure they have protection to make up the cost at release time (if the audiences like the flick enough to go see it).

What a fucking loss for humanity.

I'm pretty sure JK Rowling would have written Harry Potter (the book) with or without IP laws. I'm pretty sure Notch would have written Minecraft with or without IP laws. I'm pretty sure there were several bloody fantastic games made in the 90s when game piracy was easier and more common.

IP isn't what makes people pay to see Batman. The loss of IP would not prevent studios from making a killing with Batman at a theater, they'd just have to be a touch more creative in controlling distribution, timing, and release of the official copy. Even without IP, they can contract with the theater to make it a violation of the contract for the theater to copy the film as a condition of getting it. IP isn't what protects the movie industry, it's what protects the home video industry and some of the long tail profits.

Also, making a great movie doesn't require 300 million dollars, and the world did just fine before 300 million dollars movies existed.

That's not the question. The question is whether you're entitled to prohibit people from sharing media with each other.

If you don't feel entitled to the media, nobody is saying you must get it. You're free to remain media-less.

The current view from the entitled that since it is easy to get for free, then there isn't any reason why it shouldn't legally be free otherwise. No amount of grand vision writeups on how information wants to be free will say anything different than this basic point.

Everything should be free, except of course whatever the entitled do for work, that obviously should be paid for, because hey that actually affects their income, not someone elses.

I never felt that an organization had the right to prevent me from accessing a piece of our culture because they have a piece of paper.

Copyright as it exists today transfers ownership of culture from artists to corporation; subsequent bartering of ownership means that the price _you_ want to pay goes nowhere near those what made it.

It is a travesty that Apple was _bragging_ that the Beatles music was in the iTunes store, as if that was some accomplishment of openness instead of lawyerly bickering.

Which is all to say: it isn't the paying for it that makes people oppose copyright. It's who we'd have to pay.

I am glad the courts have consistently ruled in favor of the producers over the privileged consumer class. We need more creativity and production. Production should be rewarded.

All paintings, music, theater, opera, digital photographs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera: So this is all free then? Sounds good to me. I mean, if you're telling me I'm entitled to all of this, I guess that's pretty cool. Not sure my friends who went to film school will like not having jobs, but if that's what the world owes me... too bad for them.

>> "Which is all to say: it isn't the paying for it that makes people oppose copyright. It's who we'd have to pay."

You don't like music executives.

I don't like banks.

But if I want to buy a house I'm going to have to go through one in all likelihood. Because I hate bankers, that does not entitle me to a free house.

And what do you do professionally? What if a large part of the country decided they don't like your industry, and that you shouldn't be paid for any of your services or goods?

Informational goods are nonrival: any number of people can use them without obstructing anyone else's use.

So normal property laws are not 'just as arbitrary and artificial' as intellectual monopoly laws: they are grounded in actual physical limitations.

The key difference between physical property and intellectual property is the ease of rights enforcement. It's easy to detect when someone has infringed your rights on your own physical property. The progress of the internet, on the other hand, makes it constantly harder to detect and punish infringement of intellectual property rights. It is still unknown whether reversing this trend will retard the potential of the Internet, but certain recent legislative attempts lead me to believe so.

I think that the debate will ultimately turn on the question of ease of enforcement. All the philosophical trappings of whether certain rights should be granted is irrelevant if they can't be granted.

Even this is far from universal. In many countries (Norway and Sweden for example), there are strict rules on what you can and cannot restrict people from doing on your land. You cannot stop me from walking across your land, camping on your land or foraging for food on your land (assuming of course I do these things in a reasonable and sensible manner, ie do my best to remain out of sight, don't camp too close to buildings, don't cut down trees or damage crops, don't stay in one place for too long etc, etc. ). Basically my right to free access to nature supersedes your right to do what you want with your land. The same sort of conceptual argument could be made about the "rights" to media.

People pirate media because they can. We pay for services rendered (Netflix) or goods delivered (DVD's) because we can't get away without doing so due to technical and/or legal constraints. Everything else is rationalization.

> Does there need to be? People are taking something for free, something someone is trying to sell and does not want to be taken for free. Surely that is enough for illegal sharing of music to be considered bad? If an artist wants their music to be free they would make it free.

Most of the pushes for these laws and raids are done by studios who insist they are losing out, big-time. "Think of the jobs!" If the pirates cannot have their narrow anecdotal evidence, nor can the studios. ;)

"People are taking something for free" simplifies the issue, and misrepresents it as well. If I made a song and priced it at three billion dollars and thousands of people "stole" it, would it be the biggest theft in the history of mankind? The terms set out by which information can be exchanged should not be exclusively in control of the creator. Copyright has generally existed under the premise that society demands a little fair use in return. That should be based on what is practical to enforce, and partially on what benefits culture the most.

Consider that almost nothing can be done about piracy without sacrificing everybody's civil liberties. This is not a crackpot theory, technologies exist _today_ which end the ability of the government to enforce copyright or any other law over information being exchanged between two parties. The Internet would have to be deeply curated. Even that wouldn't stop it.

Are you willing to go that far to enforce copyright? If not (as I hope) you should support making non-commercial filesharing legal, and expanding fair use in other ways.

Yes. The question of morality require more than the simple fact that someone can gain something of value without loosing something of value in exchange.

A question asked by Eben Moglen (a professor in law historian and founder of FSLC), if bread could be copied with no costs by the process of pressing a button, what would the argument be to require more for bread than what a starving person would be able to pay? Would it be morally right to deprive a person of what he or she need to live when it cost you nothing to allow the person to survive? And if you do decide to deprive the person of that bread in a effort to give money for the first bread created, would the death of the starving man then be murder?

And before you say "but copyrighted works are not necessary for living", please consider the effect of education has on a person ability to survive. There has also been physcology experiments that has proven the need, the almost extreme need for culture we human beings have. Deprive people of it and there is physical effects from it.

I didn't want to try and make the point because I can't find the information I have seen before and I'm not confident in saying it, but I'm sure I've seen information shown before that if an album had 100,000 listeners 10 years ago it could have yielded x return (enough to justify the investment and risk) and now 100,000 album listeners might mean only 1,000 purchases, which is often not enough to justify the investment and risk. I don't even think there needs to be evidence to justify the point, because it's common sense: If 100,000 people consume something and only 10% of those paid for it that's worse than if 50,000 consumed it but 50,000 paid for it (accounting for listener growth, now vs. 10 years ago)

> "People are taking something for free" simplifies the issue, and misrepresents it as well. If I made a song and priced it at three billion dollars and thousands of people "stole" it, would it be the biggest theft in the history of mankind? The terms set out by which information can be exchanged should not be exclusively in control of the creator. Copyright has generally existed under the premise that society demands a little fair use in return. That should be based on what is practical to enforce, and partially on what benefits culture the most.

The cost of something does not matter when discussing whether or not it's right or wrong to take something. If a song costs $0.10 or $100 it's still wrong to take it. No, downloading a song that is priced at $3,000,000 isn't worse than downloading a song priced at $1, but that doesn't make either of them right? I'm not sure I entirely understand the point you're trying to make here.

> Are you willing to go that far to enforce copyright? If not (as I hope) you should support making non-commercial filesharing legal, and expanding fair use in other ways.

Personally I would much rather society just stopped being so damn selfish and accepted that if someone wants something they either meet the terms of the owner or just don't consume it. If I want an album that costs $10, I pay $10, if I want an album that costs $100,000, either I pay $100,000 or I don't get the album, I should not just download it for free and say "well it isn't worth $100,000 anyway, so whatever, fuck them, civil liberties!"

It's not about copyright, it's about respect for other human beings, respect for the people that create the content you consume. If someone prices something at $100,000 either you pay for it or you don't get it.

That's the problem. You're stuck thinking that a download == a lost sale, which is probably what supports the figures you gave. I'm pretty sure if I go download a thousand songs off of what.cd right now, I'm not draining a thousand dollars out of the music industry. In fact, I'm not draining a cent out of it.

A huge percentage of pirates not only had no intention on purchasing, but no money to purchase with. Not that they're necessarily entitled to the music, but the money you want to pretend is being lost just doesn't exist. What use is telling these people not to be so "selfish"? How is that a solution?

Piracy is a systemic problem due to copyright's flaws, not the other way around. You didn't provide a useful solution for any of this.

> No, downloading a song that is priced at $3,000,000 isn't worse than downloading a song priced at $1, but that doesn't make either of them right? I'm not sure I entirely understand the point you're trying to make here.

I was making the point that the author of some creative content should not be able to set all of the terms of their creation, including what they perceive as damages. (This is exactly what "fair use" is.)

No, no I'm not. Nobody believes a download is a lost sale, it's certain that there is crossover between people that would buy if they couldn't pirate but there is no way that every illegal download is a lost sale.

My point is that if you (a label, a musician) expect 100,000 people to listen to a song then you should be able to expect that 100,000 people will acquire that listen through means that you support? Either a download or a stream or any other "legitimate" method. If a label or artist only cared about securing the maximum number of listens then they would make the song free, but (most) choose not to, which would indicate they want every listen to be a paid listen (or through an official streaming system), correct?

> A huge percentage of pirates not only had no intention on purchasing, but no money to purchase with. Not that they're necessarily entitled to the music, but the money you want to pretend is being lost just doesn't exist. What use is telling these people not to be so "selfish"? How is that a solution?

I'm not pretending money is disappearing and then 100,000 illegal downloads = $100,000 in lost revenue. I'm stating that if an artist or label publishes a song online and they decide it will cost $1 to download then they should be able to expect 100,000 downloads to net them $100,000 in revenue. If 100,000 downloads means only net $5000 in revenue (95,000 illegal downloads, 5000 legitimate) then that is unreasonable and they should be able to consider that "bad", and make efforts to stop that (through shutting down of illegal download services).

> Piracy is a systemic problem due to copyright's flaws, not the other way around. You didn't provide a useful solution for any of this.

I don't have any solutions, but that doesn't justify piracy and make it acceptable, or something that should be allowed. Piracy should be illegal.

Now, I'm not saying that everything is nice and clean, and I believe that the amount of money spent is actually decreasing. But, frankly, it's been what, 12 years since Napster ? The music industry should, and probably does, takes piracy into account when planning their sales.

Scare tactics are a way to protect their business. I understand that. I would prefer it if they used different tactics to convince me to give them money, though.

No. Technology changes markets. The market needs to adapt, not ban the technology--banning the technology is just a shortsighted, temporary move. In the long run, the people who adapt to the new uses of technology are the ones who are going to survive (in the marketplace). "Buggy-whip manufacturers" and all that....

The argument that piracy isn't a lost sale just isn't true much of the time.

Respect is a two way street. I think the lack of respect you are noticing is a reactive response to infinite copyright and other heavy handed tactics.

I respect the people that create content I consume. That does neither imply that I am forced to pay for the distribution of their works nor that my right to share information of whatever kind should be limited.

>If someone prices something at $100,000 either you pay for it or you don't get it.

Of course I cannot force someone to give me something. However, someone who has acquired something cannot be forbidden from sharing it. In other words: your rights end where mine begin, and it is my good right to share what I have.

So, in your hypothetic scenario, a wealthy supporter or a bunch of fans pooling money could pay the $100k, then share the work with the world. I see no problem with this.

Informational goods are nonrival. The right and wrong of their use is fundamentally different from that of rival goods. One does not 'take' informational goods, one copies them. Normal property is, as a first simplification/approximation, justified by the loss of taking. And that because moral rules in general are, roughly speaking, justified by how they affect other people. Since copying lacks that effect of loss it obviously cannot reasonably be treated in the same way.

The GNU is exactly the opposite of normal copyright. The fact that it is based on copyright law is just an implementation detail because the FSF does not have enough clout to pass actual laws. It's a clever hack of the legal system, not an ideological reaffirmation of copyright.

The idea behind normal copyright--what some people here do not like--is to limit others' access to information. The whole point is that you cannot copy something without the right-owner's permission.

The GPL is the opposite. The core idea there is that you are not only allowed to make a copy of something, but you are also allowed to access the source code. In practical terms, this is just as important as being able to copy a program because the only meaningful way to make modifications is with access to the source code. Moreover, the license ensures that anybody using the licensed program keeps it free in the same way.

Essentially, where normal copyright keeps you from using the information, the GPL keeps you from using copyright law to keep others from using the information. In a very practical sense, something under the GPL is more free than something in the public domain--I could ship you something containing public domain code and not give you the source code or even let you modify it. I could not do that with the GPL.

Another way to look at it is that normal copyright gives rights to the "rights-holder" over the consumer. The GPL gives rights to the consumer (like access to source code) rather than to the rights-holder. The "restrictions" it places are the sort of restrictions any system based around rights has to have--you have the right to do almost anything as long as you do not infringe others' rights. In this context it means you can do anything you want (including selling the software) as long as you do not stop others from modifying and redistributing it.

In short: the GPL is the opposite of copyright and it gives the consumer more freedom. The only thing it stops you from doing is taking away others' freedom. The only reason it uses copyright is because copyright effectively allows you to write your own laws (but limited to whatever works you've copyrighted) without going through the legislature. In a perfect world, it would be unnecessary--all software would just be free as in freedom.

  The GNU is exactly the opposite of normal copyright. 
  [...] The idea behind normal copyright--what some people 
  here do not like--is to limit others' access to 
  information. The whole point is that you cannot copy 
  something without the right-owner's permission.

They might choose the GPL for the reasons you state - or they might prefer a different license, like the Affero GPL, or GPL2 instead of GPL3. If we think that shouldn't be the developer's choice, whose should it be?

That's the fundamental split: copyright normally gives the creator the "right" to take away the consumer's rights; the GPL merely prevents this and maintains the consumer's rights.

As others have pointed out, the idea behind copyright is to give a creator a limited monopoly over some information (ideally in order to encourage arts and science). The GPL subverts this: not only does the initial creator give up the monopoly, but the license ensures that nobody can subsequently reclaim a monopoly on the work in question. That is, the GPL involves not only giving rights to your consumers but also making sure as many people as possible cannot take those rights away again.

Essentially, it shouldn't be the creator's choice at all. The consumer has some rights (like being able to see and modify what runs on their computer) and these rights should not be infringed. That's entire core of the GPL and that's why it's the opposite of copyright normally: it protects the consumer and not the producer. The fact that it happens to be implemented on top of copyright law really is an implementation detail--if it was possible to pass a law protecting the right of every computer owner to be able to access and modify any code running on their system, the FSF would surely support it.

In summary: the GPL is about the consumer where copyright is normally about the producer. That's why they are different.

"Freedom to be shot", and "freedom to not be shot" is not the same thing. Yes, both include the world "freedom", but its not the same kind of freedom. Same goes for rights, laws, and in this discussion even software licenses. What count is the Intent and what real world effects it has.

This isn't always the case. MGMT comes to mind as a band who wanted to release their album (Congratulations) for free download but the studio or producer or whoever wouldn't let them. This isn't always the case I'm sure, but it's also not a fair statement to say that if you can't get an album for free it's the artist who wants it that way. There's a lot of people that have their fingers in the pie.

They made their band a business: they have to deal with the consequences. Using MGMT as an example of how "bad" record companies are is very disingenuous, they chose to sell out.

If technology renders something unnecessary, we should let the firms making the unnecessary product(s) disappear, rather than totally distorting markets, changing existing laws and reducing civil liberties to keep the markets-as-they-currently-exist around.

The only answer to that is to claim something more than "just a business" about making music or movies (or whatever "Intellectual Property" notion you want to push). At that point, you've departed from treating things legalistically. You have to start allowing for philosophical considerations.

Technology has not rendered copyright unnecessary. Yes, it is easier to mass-infringe these days than in the past but you must remember that, not only has it been possible (and generally easy) to infringe upon copyright, but that that is the very reason why copyright exists in the first place.

Intellectual property is more than a business and it's silly to claim otherwise. To quote the US Constitution on the matter:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

This is the clause that essentially says "People can copy the work of others so in order to encourage creation we will allow creators an exclusive monopoly for some time after which it will belong to the public."

The problem with copyright is not that the industry is trying to pretend that it's not easy to copy because that is really nothing new; the problem with copyright is that the idea of "limited Times" has gotten ridiculous but that is an entirely different conversation.

Or is your viewpoint more along the lines that you still want them to make this so-called unnecessary product, but due to your "philosophical considerations", you feel that it's okay to take a copy of the product without paying the asking price?

The recording companies are what come to my mind anyways... shrugs

Music creation is still an unsolved problem. Previously, financing of music creation was tied to distribution. Now that distribution is unnecessary, we need to rethink how society should promote not only creation of music, but of all intellectual capital.

Record labels provide a lot of value, they provide the funding to produce albums, to go on tours, they provide the marketing experience and reach to take a band from small to big. Labels don't just take a chunk and provide no value, otherwise why would anyone sign? Labels provide a lot of value: value that (apparently) nobody on the internet understands.

Justin Bieber is a great example, he was a dumb kid on Youtube singing songs and had a small fanbase, he could have continued alone to make songs and maybe sell them on Bandcamp and maybe make a few thousand $, instead he chose to sign with a label and today is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. He is a global brand. Would Justin Bieber be worth $xxx,xxx,xxx today if he stuck it alone? Has any independent musician ever done that before? The value of labels is clear.

People don't need labels now to build a following, that much is true, but that doesn't mean labels should not expect the same protections that other business types get. If a label has a product they should have reasonable expectations of control over that product, this includes making it illegal to steal that product.

I really don't follow music much, I have a tin ear, as they say. I merely see Music-production-as-big-business doing a lot of things (lobbying, propagandizing, maybe even comment trolling) that seem, well, authoritarian, totalitarian and not for the general good. Specific laws that promulgate what I see as a false-to-fact concept, "Intellectual Property" mostly have the backing of music and movie production companies, and pharmaceutical companies. Those companies appear to me, an outside observer, to be less than helpful to the general populace. If they need to drastically curtail civil liberties for success in the market, let the companies fail.

That's because they sold "their" music.

The fact that you can't give away something after you sell it doesn't imply that you can't give something away that you still own.

> There's a lot of people that have their fingers in the pie.

Only if you sell them the pie.

It doesn't seem like enough to me. Failing to conform to other people's personal preferences is not, in and of itself, bad. Some artists might prefer that their music only be played in appropriately serious and contemplative situations, but I wouldn't consider you a bad person for playing their stuff as background music while you clean — primarily because it doesn't hurt anyone.

The question of injury is very central to many people's ideas of morality. Other people's idiosyncrasies are less likely to weigh heavily in the estimation.

The biggest pirates I knew would shell out a lot of money for broadband internet access, before there was much reason to have such a thing - unless you were into torrents. Clearly they were willing to pay money to get the content they want. They're morality just wasn't very integrated with their consumption habits.

Yes, but if you allow piracy to continue, people will think it's just fine and it will eventually drive the price of music and movie down to $0. You are hurting pretty much every artists by pirating..but you just don't seem to care. You must be part of the entitlement generation.

"Any concrete proof that "piracy" is actually costing them actual real money?"

Why does the HN community get so upset when the GNU is violated and a company uses GNU code in a proprietary application (remember the wordpress thesis themes)? It's the same exact principal as pirating apps.

"It certainly was for Louis CK."

It worked once..and it may work a few more times. But, when people are used to the cheap prices, the piracy will eat up all the profits again. Ever talk to an app developer? 99 cent apps are pirated all the time...which tells me it has nothing to do with the money (IE: "it's too expensive" is a bullshit excuse).

"so then cant they invest rather than using government to beat on their customers?"

If copyright/patent laws ever get repealed, don't complain when we only have a few big companies left. I'm going to save my cash..so I can start taking a small company's ideas and use my resources (that I know they don't have) to bring it to the market and put them out of business before they even have a chance. But the truth of the matter is, people like you will still be complaining....

"Why does government support failing business by using the law to do so"

If there is no market, then why is the music even pirated? Piracy shows you the legitimacy of a business. Artists that aren't popular will not be pirated as much as the popular ones.

"I'm sorry, this whole thing is absurd."

So is your rant.

I'm not sure why so many people in the HN community wants to put themselves out of business by pushing the $ value of their craft down to $0. When this happens, don't complain and don't try to unionize: you did it to yourself.

Yes, yes, I went to college, I know how free-market capitalism works. In a competitive marketplace, the price of a good should end up at its marginal cost of production. Technology has changed this cost from $19.99 (or whatever) to some fraction of a cent.

Ordinarily, we applaud this sort of thing. Laptop computers cost $300, and have more computing capability than a multi-million dollar mainframe did 20 years ago.

A decent car runs about $12,000, and gets mileage and performance that would stun consumers in 1950.

Why must we as a society treat movies and music differently? To do so distorts markets, and takes away civil liberties.

And then there is the cost of a renting out a studio, a good sound mixer, additional musicians to play parts that your main band may not be capable of, etc.

The cost of reproduction may be close to zero, but the cost of production is most certainly not dropping. Technology may allow some genres of music to be one man bands, but that is certainly not true for all music genres. Orchestras cost money.

I really don't care one way or the other about any artist who plays on the radio. I want to ensure the artists I listen to are able to continue making music, therefore I buy their music.

We could switch over to that system - it's not unprecedented, historically many rich people have been patrons of the arts and commissioned new works. You might find the art market shifts so it aims less at the man on the street and more at the millionaire in the boardroom. Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is a matter of opinion.

What do you think?

When production of Scarface movie tickets increases from zero units to one unit the film has to be made, increasing the total costs from zero to $25,000,000.

Hence, the ∆Q is 1 unit and the ∆TC is $25,000,000 giving a marginal cost of ∆TC/∆Q = $25000000/1 = $25,000,000

Could you be more specific about why I need to go to college? Is there some error in my calculation?

We're discussing the mass entertainment market, where total costs are dominated by fixed costs. Do you seriously think it's disingenuous to take fixed costs into account? I'd say it's far more disingenuous to just ignore the bulk of your expenditure.

This isn't remotely true. Sure, the value of a copy of software might become $0. But I'm not a software copyist! I'm a programmer. (Well, sort of :P.) I do not get paid to give people copies of my software--I get paid to write the software. There is a difference!

This just means that I will not be able to make money writing software to do something somebody else has already done. After all, why pay me when they can just have a copy of the existing program? But this is a good thing! After all, since the solution already exists, it would be a waste of resources to replicate it. Instead, I would be relegated to writing software that is novel. A horrible thought indeed.

Essentially, if some business needs a program to do something, and that program does not exist (which is a rather common occurrence) they would have to hire programmers to write it. Even if it did exist, they would have to hire programmers to integrate it, add features and fix bugs. And those programmers would be more effective because they would have access to a great software commons of all the software ever written--"don't repeat yourself" would become "don't repeat anyone".

I wonder if you're going to be making the same arguments when automatic programming comes around. After all, technology like that also pushes the value of your "craft" down to $0!

I think you're confusing saying something is true to wishing it was true. Just because you want it to be true, it doesn't make it true. There's actually a named logical fallacy for this, but I forget which. Personally, I would love if the market would to throw all their money at me because I'm pretty. But the reality is that it wont. You can either sit and whine that you wish the value of your craft wasn't heading to zero. Or you can build around it and find workable solutions. Like many software developers have done. And like the music and movie industry are taking too long to do the same.

Because they're plagiarizing and profiting off someone else's work without sharing in kind.

It's the same exact principal as pirating apps.

It's generally not.

Ooh, I want to play! What's your birth year?

There are other next generation file sharing and discovery tools available, and the only question is which ones will take hold and be embraced by the community? (Please reply with your favorite next-gen suggestion…)

P2P will never go away, and there will always be a counterculture movement pushing it forward.

You can't simultaneously have a free and open Internet and lock it down to file sharing.

At this stage the only reason we are having this battle is because the copyright industry believes they can still quash these services at a sufficient rate compared to the rate at which new services are created and embraced.

That may or may not be true today - but it certainly won't be true forever. Encryption and anonymization protocols are well established, and the end game is in sight for a file sharing service that is both anonymous, decentralized, fast, and resistant to junk-flood attacks.

Five years from now, take downs like this won't even be newsworthy - and the industry will have adapted their business models accordingly.

Five years from now, producers will be marketing their content direct-to-consumers over Apple TV, Netflix, Hulu, whatever.

Tribler, http://www.tribler.org/ is, to my knowledge, nearly the only assemblage advancing p2p & which is in use at the current moment. It's half academic stomping ground, one quarter experiment, and one quarter earnest direct directed software, yet this loose assemblage of different interests is, as far as I know, the only ones doing anything like what you're talking about, making systems where for example even search can be done p2p. They call this 4G P2P: http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/4thGenerationP2P .

But, yes, thanks for the share and the response.

I also remember reading about something called CryptoSphere on HN a week back. While it's also still in development and not currently useable, my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established (e.g. FreeNet, TOR, etc). Now it's a matter of finding creative ways to use these technologies to serve P2P's purposes.

It's not that far off, and with takedowns like these becoming more common I think it will only serve to catalyze next-gen development. Five years is an eternity in technology. The iPhone just turned 5, for instance. I can barely remember how I lived before I had a smart phone.

My point is that the technologies of your point are useless and irrelevant without means to create connections between people. Existing P2P and cryptoware hides stuff for all but the participating parties, but creating those groups of participation has, thusfar, always been the domain of centralized easy-to-take down services.

The mold you set, of speaking of this oncoming future, waving your hand about "next gen," is a massive dis-service and harmful uninformed PR against the work that needs to be done. The change you hope is in the wind isn't going to be a part of the technical evolution and flow of progress, it's a deliberate technological revolution, making the fickle changing mesh of us all self assemble in a behaved fashion to permit us to shoot content queries to everyone on the planet in search of a copy of XYZ audiobook, and find the two people who have it. That requires huge amounts of caching of the libraries available content out there (so we don't actually have to go ask everyone), or what Tribler calls their megacaches, which at this stage are far more local than global.

So we have steps. BuddyCast3, the social overlay that underpins much of Tribler, gets some of the way there, but it's far far from a global search, and most of it's content is populated by existing trackers. Magnets, DHT, PEX, these were all invaluable core decentralization tools, but finding what it is you want, searching through whatever content is out there, is a huge problem which, unlike better lithography technology, no one has a roadmap for achieving, and saying otherwise builds a false sense of comfort that betrays the cause.

I think you may be overstating the degree to which my optimism in our ability to advance the technology is harmful, or a disservice.

I look at technologies like TOR, and FreeNET and I think to myself "Wow. Human ingenuity is such a beautiful thing. We are rapidly approaching the day when we can freely speak and say and share whatever we want. We are building a world where every voice has an equal right to speak and cannot be silenced, but only amplified by curation and consensus. We are approaching a truly digital democracy, and its effect will reverberate across the world. Old authoritarian regimes will collapse - and have already begun to do so, thanks in part to these new technologies."

I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that we can achieve whatever we set our minds to, and perhaps it is premature to say these technologies are 'available', but the pieces are mostly there, and roads have a funny way of being formed without a roadmap. Sometimes they start as a path, with footprints that wear the ground.

Sometimes you need to believe you can do something in order for you to work up the energy and motivation to make the attempt.

I don't think betrayal is an appropriate word here. And I don't think it's necessary to solve every problem or point of attack to make major progress.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

It is not very usable, compared to just going to the piratebay/torrentz/demonoid/just reguralry googling your thing.

The other options mentioned here, RetroShare and VPN's, are about saying, fuck it, we give up, doing public p2p filesharing is impossible, we'll do it oldschool warez IRC channel style and build darknets for those that care to and know how to chase this stuff down into the deeper webs we're tunneling. There's -absolutely nothing- little new or progressive or decentralized or P2P about these solutions: they were done adequately when in 2003 Justin Frankel/AOL release WASTE (which itself was not supremely novel, just well done & usable), and before that IRC and FTP.

In other words, we still have no replacement for trackers (in the loose sense, given magnets), they make our p2p networks possible right now.

Want to combat piracy? Fix your damn business models. I don't want to pay per song, per album, per movie, per game, per book, per whatever! I am willing to pay a minor monthly subscription to get access to a library of content.

There are companies out there that get that. Most, however, do not.

The "it's not theft" argument is pedantry. There are lots of ways to obtain things for free that aren't technically theft: extortion, blackmail, fraud, etc. Illegal copying is one of those ways.

Disagree. Even in the extortion, blackmail, and fraud cases, you're removing ownership when you obtain the thing. Copying never removes ownership, so it is not in the same class. It is not theft, and it it not pedantry to claim it is not. It's incorrect to state it is something that it is not to make it sound worse than it is.

I would guess that it's at least a strong minority view -- if not a majority view -- that record labels have abdicated their moral authority to assert transgressions of this kind. It is not unlike patent trolls, where we feel that if someone fails to capitalize on a potential market and in fact attempts (politically, legally, etc.) to hinder the growth there, that they forfeit their right to be wronged.

So I think it's a shame that both sides never seem to get around to Step One, which is to say, "here's what I think the spirit of the law is, here's what I think the purpose of law as a whole is; now, do these conditions efficiently uphold those ideals?"

If those questions are answered then it may not be "pedantry" -- perhaps they think that the purpose of the law is to stop theft, and theft-like deprivations of property. There may or may not be a nuanced argument here; and we won't know until people manifest their assumptions rather than burying them under knee-jerk slogans.

Libel/Slander? Trespassing? Vandalism? Disobeying zoning laws?

http://www.panopta.com/pricing/

I'm not sure what you're asking me. Demanding something is not the same as copyright infringement or theft.

If you're asking why we won't give you the service for what you demand because nobody owns it, I would argue that a service is both physical and finite, so I believe it can be owned. Our service involves physical work being performed, and it is limited by resources, so it being owned such that you cannot demand it is still consistent with my beliefs.

No. I gave you very specific reasons why I believe what I believe. You see hand-waving because you don't want to argue against my reasons, which are clear and logically consistent.

> yet for some reason some other person (musician) somehow is in the wrong for expecting other people to pay for their service and time it took to create their music for your entertainment.

They are not wrong. I like how you put the word "service" in there, because, in fact, they do get paid for their services. Try to hire a musician to put on a show, and you will have to pay. That physical and finite service is owned by the musician, and he trades it for money.

And for the record, a "startup idea" cannot be copyrighted, and they can be and are copied all the time. The closest you can get is patenting a fundamental part of the business model.

You have to remove "by illegal means" from your statement, because you're claiming how copyright infringment is theft, and being illegal doesn't make it theft. It's illegal because it's claimed to be theft.

So your statement becomes "getting something you would normally have to pay for for free." Is this theft? If you could get something for free that you would normally have to pay for, wouldn't most people do it? What is the compelling reason not to?

You can't drop the "by illegal means" part from my statement, on the grounds that copyright infringement isn't theft, because my statement isn't predicated on it being theft, it's predicated on it being illegal behavior. Which it is, on a basis wholly distinct from theft.

"Getting something you would normally have to pay for for free by illegal means" encompasses a wide range of non-theft illegal means: by use of threat (extortion), by use of trick (fraud), etc.

The point is that it's not a very defensible position to say "give me more product at lower prices or I will subvert the law to obtain it for free."

But your statement was being used to show how copyright infringement was equivalent to theft. I think I understand what you're saying now though, is it that copyright infringement and theft are equivalent because they both are illegal and they both acquire something? If so, I would still have to disagree by saying that theft has the important distinction of removing original ownership.

> "Getting something you would normally have to pay for for free by illegal means" encompasses a wide range of non-theft illegal means: by use of threat (extortion), by use of trick (fraud), etc.

It also encompasses a wider range of non-theft legal means: finding deals, being resourceful, doing favors, etc.

When someone says theft in relation to digital music, movies, etc they mean copyright infringement. Do we really need to have these repetitive and anal retentive trips down the rabbit hole every time this topic comes up?

On the plus side, this is happening less and less often, bands I couldn't even find search results for a few years back now have people selling their albums on Amazon marketplace.

I've also talked to guys on the other side of this though, who are trying to get material to market in many different countries at once. It isn't easy, often times some stupid "international distribution agreement" is signed in the far off past with some company that about 5 minutes later decided they didn't want to have anything to do with the band thereafter.

Or music labels in different countries want different agreements that would degrade the user experience, or would upset distributors in other countries that have already signed on, or one of a million other stupid things.

Launching anything internationally isn't easy.

"10 minutes" to set up the site and half a decade of fostering, seeding trust and a community of people who laboriously upload and seed content, and then five years of fighting ISPs, world politics and DDoS attacks to stay running.

What I'll be "finest" with though is paying the artist directly, even at the same rate. I have no interest whatsoever in sponsoring the music industry, as in corporations. I want the artist to receive my money, not some manager, business executive or whatever, because the product I'm interested in is the music itself, not it's promotion.

Morally speaking I'd rather pirate and then paypal some money to the artist to support the good work.

I just want to pay 1/5th of the current cost. Distribution is now free, so why are we still paying for it?

There are plenty of artists who are coming up who charge much less.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.

For some customers it is absolutely too high so they resort to piracy. For others, it is the correct price or even too low. In a perfect world, the seller could use your income to determine price (or some other even better metric for what you are willing to pay) and charge everyone differnet amounts. Very wealthy people would pay huge amounts, impoverished people would pay very low amounts, maybe even nothing.

The question then is how the ability to pirate affects that "reasonable price" threshold, amongst other hard to quantify effects of piracy.

I imagine it pushes the price down slightly, but who knows if the record companies are acting rationally (pricewise) or could even predict the correct price they should charge to max profit. (I imagine they have some very smart people modeling pricing, but models can only get you so close).

Only there's no effort on their side to take your order, and it's way more than 18%.

However, strict ideas of "Intellectual Property" can constitute suppression of freedom of speech. That's a principle we can all get behind. "Intellectual Property" is at least moderately un-American.

Let me guess - you either don't write software for a living or you're lucky enough to write the kind of software that can't easily be copied?

I don't write software for a living right now, but I have in the past. Go right ahead and take a look: http://stratigery.com/source.html Take a copy, too. On the house.

I'll give you an example: a while back I wrote some code in C, to push an element on to a linked list. I forget exactly why, but I ended up passing the head of the linked list as a "struct list " or something like that. That project died, but I kept the function just because I was so proud of it.

Years later, I saw a programming quiz. The question was almost exactly my task. The answer to the question was my function, with the variables renamed.

Independent invention. It ruins "Intellectual Property" as property.

And yes, I'm deliberating conflating copyright and patents, because the rest of the world does so. It's "World Intellectual Property Organization", not dual "World Patent Property Organization" and "World Copyright Property Organization".

http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-theft-ridiculous-lost-sale...

> Stealing their stuff just empowers them to get dumb laws passed.

Theft is the removal of ownership. It's not stealing, it's copying.

1) Musicians should be angry with their labels. 2) Musicians should not buy into the bullshit that piracy is decreasing their cut. "Hey man, we'd pay you more, but there's so much piracy going on! The revenues aren't there! You should be mad at the pirates."

The ironic thing is that all the defenders of "free culture" piracy do is drive creators into the arms of Orwellian walled gardens like iTunes and empower legislators to write dumb laws like SOPA.

Maybe they are't as pissed off at the labels as you think?

Many are incredibly pissed at the payment structures. Take a look: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/16193319442/myth-d...

TLDR: Spotify has been accused of barely paying artists, when in fact they pay the labels, who in turn barely pay the artists. But if you search for artists who hate Spotify because of their low income, you'll find plenty of rants.

The marginal cost of printing a book is in the pennies because the cost is spread out over millions of books (across multiple titles). Materials only add a dollar or two more in costs. The majority of the cost of a book is in fixed costs prior to printing, i.e., proofreading.

Moreover, distribution costs real money (unless you also own the pipes).

Plenty of people would be willing to pay $10-20 per episode of Game of Thrones to be able to watch it legitimately without Cable+HBO at the same time as cable subscribers. $10-20 seems like a lot, but the series is extremely popular, and the 100-200 per season of GoT still costs the end user less money than cable contract + HBO. Also probably leads to more money in HBO's pockets I'd imagine.

I would pay NBC $60 for a pass to have legitimate access to their Olympic streams and coverage, but instead they require cable login information that I don't have access to because cable and internet are included in my lease.

That way you can burn it to a CD to listen to in your car or put it on your iPod Nano to take to the gym with you, and the file can't be revoked just because Microsoft changed the license. These are completely legitimate use cases. I'm sure such a hypothetical situation would work with Rhapsody or other music subscription services. Various services may embed a code in the file to tie it back to you if it winds up on a sharing site. I don't know if this method would remove that, so I would suggest keeping these files purely for your own benefit.

I was just throwing it out there as a hypothetical situation where someone could have a subscription service and also be able to use their songs as they want to use them. I subscribe to the Zune Pass and I know I have this capability, but I've never actually felt the need to exercise that power.

We can beat them with technology.

A wiki of file hashes would be great for cataloging things as malicious, describing the content, and cross referencing files with other versions (e.g. same content different format). Thus, we can make something really useful with a simple DB.

I've been working on something like this, and registered hashpipe.net as a potential domain for this service.

Anyone interesting in helping out is welcome to contact me.

To be very careful, we might decide that no URLs to a hash be cataloged in the 'wiki'.

As far as quality control - take a look at wikipedia - it's a beautiful mess. People make edits to entries all the time, some malicious, some not - there is a change tracker, and a community of editors. The consensus and the truth win out over individual acts of malice.

If shut downs were truly a concern, the database entries could be stored locally by the user making the entry and retrieval of entries would be like doing a query on a decentralized p2p network (gnutella). But then, that's messier and less scalable.

I think we should just make the wiki, and see how it goes as a first step. Establish its usefulness, build a community, and then support it.

Laws can be changed. The copyright cartels have the money and political connections to change the law in their favour. We have seen them do it before and they're going to do it again.

Torrent sites (like The Pirate Bay) are essentially just that (sites cataloguing metadata about files). They have not be immune to legal troubles, and they are certainly not "beneficial to copyright holders".

You're essentially describing current torrent sites. We have them, they are very valuable and useful. They work well enough. However they can (and are) shutdown. We need better.

Remind me what Demonoid did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribute

Media companies need to realize this and fundamentally change their business models. That is the only viable solution to discourage pirating.

Here's another comment thread on the Gizmodo article: http://gizmodo.com/5932143/ukraine-officials-shut-down-demon...

The magnet link is derived from a hash of a portion of the torrent file which includes the public flag/setting - which controls whether DHT/similar "trackerless" methods can be used for transmitting.

Without the public flag set, a magnet link for that torret is pretty much useless to a torrent client since it won't be able to discover any other peers.

Setting it will change the hash / magnet link.

But now we have What.CD, which is infinitely better than Oink in terms of features and content. From What.CD, we also have Project Gazelle, which has made setting up new torrent sites much easier by providing up-to-date private torrent site software (what runs What.CD) under the GPL. And the What.CD admins have learned from Ellis's mistakes and set up the site in such a way that it can't be taken down so easily.

It could be illegal but moral in some cases (ok, torrents are mostly used for copyright infringement, I admit, but they do have moral and legal uses).

Furthermore, it's not even illegal in every country (but we'll get the US laws applied anyways).

Yes. Some of use have no choice but to pirate (why? Our credit cards are not good for international transactions.)

I buy multiple apps every week from Mac/iOS App Store, and would like to do so for other apps/books/... that are not available at Apple's stores, but I can't. So, I used demonoid and am now very sad that it's closed. Now I have to resort to googling 'warez [some app]' and spend hours trying to find a working link... :(