I'm a little confused here. Are you saying that easy access to public domain works is bad, or are you trying to poke holes in my argument?Molikroth said:
Illegal downloading is not theft - its something new
- Thread starter Morderkaine
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You're taking one key thing for granted: that the thing being taken is a form of property.JMeganSnow said:
In some ways, "intellectual property" is like good ol' thing-you-hold-in-your-hand property.
In other ways, it's not.
For now, it's mostly expedient to treat "intellectual property" as something that's mostly like vanilla property, because that's what our legal and economic systems are best able to handle. Over time, though -- especially as we crank out more and more and more "intellectual property" but keep passing Mickey Mouse Protection Acts to extend the copyright term -- I don't think the current system of artificially transforming non-rivalrous goods into rivalrous ones is efficient or even tenable.
In short, I think of copyrights and patents as a sucky kludge that allows people to be rewarded for their efforts in developing an idea. Keeping them around forever as-is would be a mistake. Tightening them up to the extent that the reward that you get for your efforts is a special dictatorship over your idea and the ability to exercise absolute control over how it's used and collect license fees from everyone around you isn't actually going to do any good, either. We really need a system that focused on rewarding the effort (based on productive effort and not just exertion, of course) rather than property-izing the idea.
So, if you're not taking property, are you stealing?
Given that right now "IP" is kinda-property I'd say that unauthorized copying and distribution is at least... kinda-stealing.
I'm not comfortable completely equating the two because that feels like actually backsliding to a more naive economic and social model, to me.
-- Alex
It is property: anything that requires someone's investment of time and effort is property. That's what distinguishes property from, say, a rock that you found on the ground-the process of making it *valuable*. Saying that it's *not* property is equivalent to saying that it required no time or effort to produce. Video games aren't a naturally-occurring phenomenon, thus they are property.Alex_P said:
Now, I'm fully in agreement that intellectual property is *not the same* as most physical property, but there are *lots* of types of property that are like this. Broadcast frequencies, for instance. Distinct rules for each type of property that protect the rights of *everyone* involved are vitally important, but it just doesn't work to say "this is hard because it's not like swapping carrots, so we're going to abandon the entire idea".
I'm aware that current IP laws and the way they're enforced tend to be stupid, but this is because government policy nowadays is based on getting the loudest complainers to shut up, not on any type of rational process.
Not to mention the fact that the current argument is ALSO between, on the one side, a group of paranoid producers and on the other side, a group of hippie communist parasites who want everything for free. The discussion SHOULD be taking place between the producers (who can be hopefully convinced to be less paranoid), and OTHER PRODUCERS who either buy their products or compete with them in a variety of ways. A discussion between a semi-wrong side and a totally wrong side is going to favor the semi-wrong side even if they're pathological idiots. A discussion between a bunch of people who *all* have rights is going to favor a rational and equitable solution.
This is why I favor kicking anyone who pirates for any so-called reason out of the discussion altogether--they are ruining things for everyone.
What the heck is "spectrum" in this context?Alex_P said:
Effort is what determines whether something is property qua property, not the *value* of that property. Quite a lot of property is basically worthless or unsalable, but that doesn't mean that you don't own it.
Think of it this way: suppose you're alone in the wilderness. You gather berries and roots and hunt a few animals to stay alive. Then suppose one day, while you're carrying a haunch of deer and a sack of yams back to your camp, you meet another person. What operating principle would dictate that the yams that *you* dug up and the deer that *you* killed belong to *you*? You invested effort in claiming them and turning them to your purposes.
All assignment of property *rights* ultimately works using this same principle, it just gets progressively more complicated as you progress from "I found it and killed it" to "I cleared the field and dug out the rocks and planted the seeds and weeded and harvested" (which is when land property rights must be organized) to "I built the irrigation system" (water rights) to "I invented a pump" (intellectual property rights). The foundational principle for *how you lay claim to property* is identical even though the way that particular right is exercised may be vastly different.
The primary difference between intellectual property and other kinds of property is the *type* of claim involved. IP is a static claim on a dynamic process of production, whereas the right to a particular piece of physical property is a dynamic claim on a static object. Or, if you want to use business terminology, intellectual property is an *earning* asset while physical property is a *depreciating* asset--continued investment is required to maintain or increase the value of physical property, whereas IP could (in theory, in practice everyone realizes how absurd this would be and ignores the possibility) continue to bring returns forever.
This is why intellectual property rights are and must be *limited in duration*. Think for a minute what it would mean if you had to hunt down the heirs of the guy who invented the wheel and pay them before you could build a bicycle. These would be random people who weren't involved in the original act of effort investment in *any way*, how is it sane for them to have a claim on *your* proceeds?
But you have to *have* intellectual property rights for the same reason, because the ultimate fount of all wealth that exists or has ever existed is an idea that someone invested the time and effort to create. They *own* that idea. Now, figuring out exactly *how* they own that idea and what that means is the job of the government, just like guaranteeing and standardizing all of our property rights is the job of the government. Sometimes they don't get it quite right, but that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater--especially when the baby is the entirety of civilized existence.
Again, just because someone pirates $1,000 in software doesn't mean they ever had $1,000. Most pirates steal far more than they can afford. Yes, developers are losing out on a potential sale but the reality of what they would of earned compared to their theoretical losses (cost of game Times numbers illegally downloaded) is only a portion.nilcypher said:
And my logic doesn't relegate videogame pirating as a victimless action (I don't know how you came up with that idea). Clearly if someone would have bought the game but pirated it instead, then a sale is lost. That is obvious. But videogame pirates will have terra bytes of software that they can't afford which were purchases that would have not existed in the real world anyways.
I am not pro pirated software but I can objectively understand the difference between theoretical losses and real world losses and I know the semantic difference between stealing and copyright infringement.
Interesting discussion. My own two pence is this.
I think both the "Software pirates are the moral equivalent of kitten stompers" and the "f1ght th3 p0W3r, information was meant to be free, d00d" segments are more than a little lacking.
Illegal file transfer is different from physical theft in several ways. For one thing, in the eyes of the law, if you're guilty of "unauthorized duplication, performance or distribution of a creative work", they can put you in jail for five years and fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars- in the U.S., anyway. Whereas if you five-finger discount a game from a brick-and-mortar store, that's petty larceny, and you're unlikely to do anything more than pay a fine for a first offense.
So, there's that. Now, the other thing that I don't think I've seen brought up in all the almost-there-but-not-quite metaphors is this: if someone steals $50 from your wallet, or even your bank account, chances are pretty good you're going to notice eventually. If someone downloads a hacked game, it's entirely likely the game's creator will never know.
...Except it isn't just one person; it's you, and this guy hawking it in a bazaar in Iraq, and this other guy selling it out of a car in Moscow, and every person in this college's Computer Science Class, and... To a factor of a hundred, until some marketing guy looks at the anticipated sales versus the actual sales and goes, "Now hang on a minute...?!"
To be clear, I think illegal copying is wrong, in as much as it denies content providers just compensation for their work. I think the semantic point as to whether it should be called theft is largely irrelevant. And I think that self-righteously demanding that those who illegally download games recognize their place among the burgulars and muggers and hang their heads in shame is neither particularly productive nor some brave and tremendous blow for justice.
I also think "perceived losses", and the idea that every game downloaded is a lost sale, the exact equivalent of a game stolen from a brick-and-mortar shelf, is delusional at best. Software pirates are morally grey at best and complete misfits at worst, but the content providers- including the MPAA, RIAA, and ISA- haven't exactly decked themselves in glory, either. The very nature of the law presumes, rightly or wrongly, that every downloader is passing the illegally obtained work on to others, and the nature of current copy protection often assumes that every person *legally* obtaining the work is planning to as well.
The net result is often that people who plunk down their hard-earned money are struggling to make their legally purchased games work, and people who download them off torrents for free are getting, in some ways, a superior product.
Both the relevant laws and the copy protection are getting increasingly draconian, and the net effect is mostly that the pirated versions look more and more attractive, the infringers are harder to catch because an absolute interpretation would put their numbers in the high multi-millions, and the people who buy legally feel, quite legitimately, that they're being treated like criminals (perhaps more so than many of the actual criminals.)
If we're willing to allow the powers that be to strip away a lot of reasonable privacy protections and the like, the relevant companies can make a modest hunk of change from a massive number of lawsuits before going out of business from the combination of bad PR and locking up large numbers of former customers. But I rather like to imagine that the games companies would rather be in the business of game-making than lawsuits.
We're overdue for a massive overhaul of the laws that govern this digital age. More sensible laws would not only benefit the public who actually have to live with them, but they might actually be possible to enforce. A few modest suggestions:
We need clear consumer rights, including a strong, firm definition of Fair Use, and an understanding that those rights CANNOT be overwritten by anything written in a EULA. That should include redress for games that are using the public as unpaid beta-testers or won't run at all, and the ability to return software. No one should ever be worried about posting their toddler spinning around to the strains of "She Spins Me Round Like A Record" on YouTube or clips of gameplay in an unauthorized game review or the like. We also need some kind of legal protection for modders, at least those who aren't using illegally acquired assets in their creations. "I feel a need to punish those bad, bad media companies" is kind of a lame excuse, but let's disarm it.
The friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who downloads a game should be ignored. The guy who makes a torrent of their pre-release beta available a week before release should get nailed to the *wall*. (Not literally, but you get my drift.) Feel free to install draconian measures on your cubicle floor, serial numbers and encryption on your gold master disks, armed guards beside anything that can burn a disk at the factory. Just not on the Internet, please.
Copyright on most works available digitally should be, say, five years. Let's face it: the vast, vast majority of an entertainment product's revenue-generating lifespan is in the first two to three years after release. If a company continues to distribute AND SUPPORT a product, that copyright can be extended, perhaps to as much as twenty years. A lot of old media is lost, but for collectors: after a reasonable interval, the public interest should trump a tiny profit potential. Crack open Windows 95 and see if any of the conspiracy theorists were right. Let Computer Science classes reverse engineer and disect old gaming engines to learn how they work. If you can splice together Beverly Hills Cop and Star Wars into a coherent whole that's more entertaining than either original movie, be my guest.
As far as the companies themselves, my suggestion is this: digital distribution is starting to take off; keep at it. I think a lot of people really will buy the legal version if it isn't too onerous to do so. Knocking a few bucks off in recognition that they *aren't* paying for shipping, packaging, materials, a glossy manual, and the like, would also be appreciated. And if you want to ease off the early piracy, flood the torrents on release with a version that comes complete with a nasty drive-wipe of a virus. (Non-propogating, please.)(Okay, I don't know how popular that last one might be, but I figured I should offer the media providers some sort of sop.)
I think both the "Software pirates are the moral equivalent of kitten stompers" and the "f1ght th3 p0W3r, information was meant to be free, d00d" segments are more than a little lacking.
Illegal file transfer is different from physical theft in several ways. For one thing, in the eyes of the law, if you're guilty of "unauthorized duplication, performance or distribution of a creative work", they can put you in jail for five years and fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars- in the U.S., anyway. Whereas if you five-finger discount a game from a brick-and-mortar store, that's petty larceny, and you're unlikely to do anything more than pay a fine for a first offense.
So, there's that. Now, the other thing that I don't think I've seen brought up in all the almost-there-but-not-quite metaphors is this: if someone steals $50 from your wallet, or even your bank account, chances are pretty good you're going to notice eventually. If someone downloads a hacked game, it's entirely likely the game's creator will never know.
...Except it isn't just one person; it's you, and this guy hawking it in a bazaar in Iraq, and this other guy selling it out of a car in Moscow, and every person in this college's Computer Science Class, and... To a factor of a hundred, until some marketing guy looks at the anticipated sales versus the actual sales and goes, "Now hang on a minute...?!"
To be clear, I think illegal copying is wrong, in as much as it denies content providers just compensation for their work. I think the semantic point as to whether it should be called theft is largely irrelevant. And I think that self-righteously demanding that those who illegally download games recognize their place among the burgulars and muggers and hang their heads in shame is neither particularly productive nor some brave and tremendous blow for justice.
I also think "perceived losses", and the idea that every game downloaded is a lost sale, the exact equivalent of a game stolen from a brick-and-mortar shelf, is delusional at best. Software pirates are morally grey at best and complete misfits at worst, but the content providers- including the MPAA, RIAA, and ISA- haven't exactly decked themselves in glory, either. The very nature of the law presumes, rightly or wrongly, that every downloader is passing the illegally obtained work on to others, and the nature of current copy protection often assumes that every person *legally* obtaining the work is planning to as well.
The net result is often that people who plunk down their hard-earned money are struggling to make their legally purchased games work, and people who download them off torrents for free are getting, in some ways, a superior product.
Both the relevant laws and the copy protection are getting increasingly draconian, and the net effect is mostly that the pirated versions look more and more attractive, the infringers are harder to catch because an absolute interpretation would put their numbers in the high multi-millions, and the people who buy legally feel, quite legitimately, that they're being treated like criminals (perhaps more so than many of the actual criminals.)
If we're willing to allow the powers that be to strip away a lot of reasonable privacy protections and the like, the relevant companies can make a modest hunk of change from a massive number of lawsuits before going out of business from the combination of bad PR and locking up large numbers of former customers. But I rather like to imagine that the games companies would rather be in the business of game-making than lawsuits.
We're overdue for a massive overhaul of the laws that govern this digital age. More sensible laws would not only benefit the public who actually have to live with them, but they might actually be possible to enforce. A few modest suggestions:
We need clear consumer rights, including a strong, firm definition of Fair Use, and an understanding that those rights CANNOT be overwritten by anything written in a EULA. That should include redress for games that are using the public as unpaid beta-testers or won't run at all, and the ability to return software. No one should ever be worried about posting their toddler spinning around to the strains of "She Spins Me Round Like A Record" on YouTube or clips of gameplay in an unauthorized game review or the like. We also need some kind of legal protection for modders, at least those who aren't using illegally acquired assets in their creations. "I feel a need to punish those bad, bad media companies" is kind of a lame excuse, but let's disarm it.
The friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who downloads a game should be ignored. The guy who makes a torrent of their pre-release beta available a week before release should get nailed to the *wall*. (Not literally, but you get my drift.) Feel free to install draconian measures on your cubicle floor, serial numbers and encryption on your gold master disks, armed guards beside anything that can burn a disk at the factory. Just not on the Internet, please.
Copyright on most works available digitally should be, say, five years. Let's face it: the vast, vast majority of an entertainment product's revenue-generating lifespan is in the first two to three years after release. If a company continues to distribute AND SUPPORT a product, that copyright can be extended, perhaps to as much as twenty years. A lot of old media is lost, but for collectors: after a reasonable interval, the public interest should trump a tiny profit potential. Crack open Windows 95 and see if any of the conspiracy theorists were right. Let Computer Science classes reverse engineer and disect old gaming engines to learn how they work. If you can splice together Beverly Hills Cop and Star Wars into a coherent whole that's more entertaining than either original movie, be my guest.
As far as the companies themselves, my suggestion is this: digital distribution is starting to take off; keep at it. I think a lot of people really will buy the legal version if it isn't too onerous to do so. Knocking a few bucks off in recognition that they *aren't* paying for shipping, packaging, materials, a glossy manual, and the like, would also be appreciated. And if you want to ease off the early piracy, flood the torrents on release with a version that comes complete with a nasty drive-wipe of a virus. (Non-propogating, please.)(Okay, I don't know how popular that last one might be, but I figured I should offer the media providers some sort of sop.)
Technically, you don't own the frequency, you own the right to broadcast *on* that frequency in a certain area. If this right didn't exist, cell phones, television, wireless internet, and all the rest wouldn't exist. It'd be like the early days of ham radio, with stations constantly jamming and interfering with each other. There'd be no incentive to invest in providing a wide-area service because pretty much no one would be able to receive your service consistently.Alex_P said:
I missed this when it got posted. Don't make personal attacks at other forum members.elpresidente said:
Speaking of...the color of your nick always makes me think you're on probation.nilcypher said:
Your whole post was well crafted and I agree. And yes digital distribution looks like a good win-win situation for everyone who has internet. But lets wait a couple of more decades and by then, digital distribution should be the norm.Callate said:
I do have an arguement for you. It may sound weird but thought you would have a better insight and reply to the point m going to make
We see piracy being discussed by developers as it hurts them ( which it does definitely ) but are these developers guilty of piracy themselves ? Check their mp3 players or media collection. If they have a few pirated versions lying around, then why should the consumer care about their product ?
You also see pirated versions of SDKs, tools, OSs installed on the computers they use for development. Do they then have the right to complain if their product is geting pirated ? I am not saying all devs do this but isn't this possible ? What about the TV shows and movies they download off torrents for their own viewing pleasure at home, but then come to work and complain about piracy amongst themselves ! Isn't that ironical ?
Piracy will have to be lived with m afraid and unless it becomes hard,risky or rare to pirate, it will continue to eat a slice of the revenue pie everytime.
It's not "demonizing" to call something what it really is. Calling it "file sharing", however is nefarious in that it makes something immoral sound better than it really is. Sort of like when politicians say "redistribution of wealth" instead of "robbing Peter to pay Paul".Good morning blues said:
It is theft because you are stealing potential profit. No crap about not buying it anyway; you don't know what you would have done if you didn't have the opprtunity to pirate.
So pirate all you like and hope that you don't get caught but there is no justification for saying arrr.
So pirate all you like and hope that you don't get caught but there is no justification for saying arrr.
I could just as easily say that "class exploitation" is the correct term, but that would be demonizing your side. Yes, this totally is demonization.dukethepcdr said:
So, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement; copyright is, at its core, an attempt to artificially impose scarcity on information so that it can fit into our capitalist system. Think about it - why do we pay for houses to live in or a toaster or any other material good? Because it's scarce. The fact that I live in this house means that fewer houses are available for other people. The fact that I own this toaster means that there are fewer toasters available for other people. That's the whole justification for charging money for it - if there were enough that everybody could have as much as they want, it would be air: completely worthless, a shared resource.
Information - a song, a movie, a video game - does not operate this way. Me listening to a song does not affect anybody else's ability to listen to it. In fact, by consuming this information, I can potentially apply my own experience and experience to it and IMPROVE it - often, consuming information INCREASES the amount of information that is available to other people.
The whole reason that copyright exists is so that we can have a concept similar to theft for it; this is an arbitrary imposition with no real basis in reality. Despite how much it has been naturalized, it hasn't always been this way - if you had said that people should pay to listen to music 300 years ago, people would have thought you were insane.
Copyright worked pretty well for a long time, but new media has destroyed its effectiveness. It needs to be revised. Copyright has always been an attempt to balance the interests of information providers with the interests of society (which benefits from the free circulation of information). Right now, copyright law is heavily skewed in the interests of information providers; this needs to be changed, because until it is, people are going to continue to disregard copyright law entirely, and eventually it will have no teeth at all.
That's not true at all. The definition of theft is, in empirical terms, what Morderkaine described, though intellectual property laws double as legal stipulations and add-ons that have to be adhered to variously (consider how the definition of 'property' affects what you're suggesting) - especially in sectors that make money. Your presumptive essentialism, in this case, is foolhardy: continually, you've tried to ascribe a simplism to matters of intellectually property that is a) inept, and b) doesn't exist. I won't go over my tracks again - you've already waffled numerous times anyway - except to say that, as I mentioned before, intellectual property laws as they stand aren't neccessarily in tandem with the transmission of goods historically (suffice to say not wholly compatible with art), and are debateable in terms of the extent to which they serve society, short of the transnational corporations which have been so vehement in campaigning to 'protect artists' or some such bafflegab. Seriously, try reading a book and developing an understanding of this issue instead of just defaulting to a simplistic, 'u downloaded it and its not urs' position.
Or in other words: your arguments = pointless.
Exactly. Intellectual property rights in pertinence to file sharing negate the concept of supply and demand, which is the only organic basis on which trade has historically functioned. Therefore, the notion that a monetary value should be assigned to endlessly reproducible files is entirely an abstract construct of capitalism, and is thusly very, very debateable.
What?
