Obama administration: "Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft"

[Kair]

Sorry server bug.

 

[Incarnatos]

What most people fail to realize is that, while piracy means you obtain something without paying for it, and thus hurting the creators of said product, many people wouldn't waste money on said product, either due to not having disposable income, or due to it not being worth the price.

So restricting piracy in most cases, won't increase sales to any significant degree.

And no, I didn't read the entire thread.

 

[Kair]

And the capitalists wish to do what to stop people from sharing?

Sharing is when several people all share the same item, not when several people pay for one item licensed to one person and clone the item, giving each of them an item of their own.

So you say that it is impossible to share information?

Only if you all use the same copy, otherwise it's cloning.

So you cannot share a thought? Is it cloning if you and another person come to an agreement?

 

[Cynical skeptic]

In what way are artists entitled to 100% of the profits if a distributor

I'm going to stop you right there, because you're describing a dead business model.

Intelligent bands (and some labels) view CDs and MP3s, illicit or not, as advertising. The illicit ones being free advertising. Advertising for their... concerts. Where most of the money has always been in music.

For a while, back in the early days, it was backwards, concerts were advertising for records. But its right now.

 

[Seldon2639]

TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO QUOTED ME, ALL TWENTY SEVEN OF YOU:

I CANNOT spend another few hours attempting to debunk everything that has been said. The comments are to long and it's becoming a chore. I'll just quote Dowling v. United States, a 1985 case regarding copyright infringement:

"...interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ... 'an infringer of the copyright.' ...
The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud."

True, in a sense, but largely irrelevant to the debate.

They specifically reference "theft, conversion, [and] fraud" vis-a-vis 18 U.S.C 2314. If the legislature were to change 2314 to reflect that copyright infringement is theft, their ruling would no longer be black-letter law.

Remember, please, that the Court interprets the will of the legislature. And, besides, in any debate following rules, there's what's called "fiat", which shifts the debate from "hurr, how does the legislature/court define a term" to "hurr, how should they".

What most people fail to realize is that, while piracy means you obtain something without paying for it, and thus hurting the creators of said product, many people wouldn't waste money on said product, either due to not having disposable income, or due to it not being worth the price.

So restricting piracy in most cases, won't increase sales to any significant degree.

And no, I didn't read the entire thread.

It's not that anyone doesn't realize it, it's that many people disagree with it wholesale. There's no evidence that DRM hurts sales, or that piracy doesn't (much less that it acts as an "advertisement" and "demo").

 

[Cynical skeptic]

Don't you understand? It DOESN'T matter how much that music is worth to the artist and distributor, you're still stealing it! You have no right to take something that isn't offered to you by someone with the right to it. Theft is still theft, even if you prefer to call it 'advertising'.

Wait, I'm stealing it?

You mean if I download all of beiber's songs, he won't be able to sing anymore?

Holy Fucking Jesus! I'll get right on that.

Just a question, will I have to download every other song so he can't cover them?

The problem with attributing value to a non-consumable, non-degradeable product that is infinitely and effortlessly reproducible, infinitely and effortlessly distributable is... you can't. The concept runs in complete opposition to all facets of capitalism and every concept of value we have.

 

[Kair]

So you cannot share a thought? Is it cloning if you and another person come to an agreement?

OK, you're talking about an 'idea' now and not'someone else's copyrighted data that they have committed to recording' but no, you cannot 'share' a thought, you can give a copy of that same thought to someone else, you can't share it because the thought is still in your head even if the other person is using it. And an agreement is two people agreeing, not sharing data.

Let's get that straight, data isn't ephemeral like a thought or a colour, 'data' is something that someone has made.

The word is correct for both instances, your attempts to change the meaning of the word in favour of the ownership of information is futile.

Humans have always shared information, it was what made Homo Sapiens survive while the Neanderthals became extinct.

Information is free. Information is an endless resource. Endless resources are available to everyone and should be distributed such. To put a price tag on information is to limit the resource unnecessarily.

The work put into the development of information are a whole other matter. The limitation of information for profit is another unfortunate product of the consumer culture and market forces of the obsolete and tedious capitalist system.

And I do assume bias will get the better of you and you will contradict my every argument. But assumptions are some of our worst enemies, and I can only hope you are of the few who set aside pride for an open mind.

 

[Cynical skeptic]

-snip-

The reason I'm kinda skimming over what you're saying is because you (and every single solitary anti-piracy advocate) skims over the part where obtaining an exact copy at no one's expense is anything other than copyright infringement and how that in any way, shape, or form, equates to theft beyond a purely hypothetical sense.

Every single anti-piracy argument is always prefaced with "[description of copyright infringement], and that is stealing," and then goes on, as if what was said is not, at best, a fraction of a complete thought.

Crime requires damages. If someone is selling copyrighted material without the copyright owner's knowledge or permission, you can prove damages (coughusedcoughgamescough). But without that monetary transfer, any losses or damages cannot extend beyond the realm of hypothesis, as even for it to enter the realm of theory requires some sort of evidence.

So, basically, you regurgitate propaganda at me, I make jokes at your expense. Jokes constructed to reveal how absurd the "copyright infringement without monetary transfer = theft" argument is.

Now, I'll concede that file sharing isn't a capitalist venture or action. Which can be confusing to anyone over 25, as all that cold war propaganda painted anything that wasn't capitalistic in nature as pure unadulterated evil.

 

[Shynobee]

Wow, this is the first thing from this administration that I actually support. Go figure.

 

[TheGreenGoblin]

MrShine Says (and the quote button doesn't work):

Please don't say "pirating killed the industry" without providing some solid evidence to that fact. There have been some major economic downturns recently and everyone is feeling a crunch, plus the fact maybe they just aren't marketing right or there simply aren't enough consumers to make such purchases viable? Economics has 1,000,000 factors all interacting in real time, don't say it was just one element of a complex web.

Please don't say "the economy (is complex)" to explain away anything involving financial failure. The downfall of recorded media began several years before the recent Wall Street crisis--a crisis that affected housing markets and lending. The only thing it really did was give customers another reason to hold on to their money. It poured salt in the wound, sure, but the wound was caused by piracy.

The copying of songs isn't new. Once upon a time, before riding our dinosaurs to school, we'd press the record button on a cassette deck and capture a song from the radio. If you were lucky, some gadget wizard with two VCRs could copy a movie for you. The quality wasn't as good, and without the Internet to turn any old fool into a distributor overnight, there weren't many illegal businesses to cut into the real ones. And gas was like $0.53 a gallon.

Now everyone can get professional-grade media for free. And anyone can open a paysite to download movies, or at least make money driving fake torrent traffic. ("Click here to download [whatever you just typed in the search box]") Some sites have scruples; JapanAnime and HentaiKey have an understanding. But that's not everyone.

 

[Kair]

The word is correct for both instances, your attempts to change the meaning of the word in favour of the ownership of information is futile.

Humans have always shared information, it was what made Homo Sapiens survive while the Neanderthals became extinct.

Information is free. Information is an endless resource. Endless resources are available to everyone and should be distributed such. To put a price tag on information is to limit the resource unnecessarily.

The work put into the development of information are a whole other matter. The limitation of information for profit is another unfortunate product of the consumer culture and market forces of the obsolete and tedious capitalist system.

And I do assume bias will get the better of you and you will contradict my every argument. But assumptions are some of our worst enemies, and I can only hope you are of the few who set aside pride for an open mind.

Holy shit, you're right! You're so, so right, I should have realised that you always have the right to copy the ideas of others!

...

Nah, I'm shitting you.

Now you're succumbing to my favourite logical fallacy, that blindly agreeing with someone else makes me open minded. open-mindedness is a willingness to consider new ideas, not an immediate adoption of what everyone else says. "Be open-minded, think what I want you to think." Don't assume you're right just because you're you.

it's nothing to do with consumer culture you understand, it's to do with wanting people to come up with new ideas. the only way to do that is to let people be rewarded for it, just look at the economical, technological and media stagnation in the Soviet Union. If people don't have an incentive to work hard they won't.

Now let's get to the crux of this, you feel you have a right to copy other's data without paying because you know you'll never make anything that anyone else wants. That's where socialist theory falls down you know, it's easy to preach free sharing of everything when you've got nothing but I bet if you spent two years writing a novel you'd not want everyone to have it for free.

1) I just told you the reward is a completely different matter. It is all subject to the alternative, and the alternatives to profiting from limitation are many.
Do you deny the presence of alternatives to the sale of information?

2) If all development information requires financial incentives, why is there Linux, Firefox and other open source programs today?

3) 'You' wouldn't be the proper word to use when telling a Communist that (here'he' would never give out information that he has worked on for free.
Do you deny that people can be selfless?

4) The Soviet Union and Socialistic China stagnated and failed because of the lack of free information. A closed society meant all corners of society were isolated. Failures were repeated and never corrected because they were not acknowledged.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution failed because the communes could not report that they were under-performing in fear of punishment.

 

[PrinceoN]

Here's the answer to piracy:

Have the government hire some people to create virus's in the shape of downloadable songs, albums, movies, and games. Have said people post their files on torrent and P2P sites. People who download everything they can get their hands on will obtain the viruses and lose everything on their computers. Fair punishment.

But the common people (like say, most of us) who just don't want to fork out 13 bucks for a cd just to get ONE DAMN SONG FROM IT (or 8.99 for a single that has one damn song on it, remixed 3 times with programs that it took someone all of 5 minutes to use), or people who want one song from a cd that a company DOESN'T SELL ANYMORE will probably be perfectly fine.

But.... Creating viruses is illegal too, isn't it? And the government has to follow laws too.

haha oh that's so cute. do you still leave milk and cookies out for santa on christmas? cause if you believe the government follows its own laws, you must do that as well!

/offensive. but seriously. governments break laws everyday for the "good of the people".