kickassfrog said:
Mr F. said:
Property is theft. Intellectual moreso. The only way I passed my last college course was through downloading textbooks which were not available in the public library and which were prohibitavely expensive.
Umm, because the author put a lot of time into doing that, and with a relatively small pool of potential purchasers needs to charge more money to buy food and other extravagant things.
Dude, studying costs money. I'm going to university next year and it's not the cost of the books I'm concerned about.
Lets see.
If you are going to University in England, you will be in debt to the tune of 27,000 pounds with regards to tuition loans and, at a minimum, 10,500 pounds with regards to maintenance loans. A university education, which used to be funded by the state, now puts the average student in debt to the tune of 37,500 pounds. Factor in the insane idea that maintenance loans should not be forced to at least cover the cost of housing (My housing for this coming year comes in at 3674 pounds, 174 pounds MORE than my loan to cover housing, clothing and food) and getting a degree is almost pointless from a fiscal outlook. Degree holders earn, on average, 7% more than people who do not have degrees. Chances are, unless you become an MP, a lawyer or a scientist, your degree will never pay for itself or at least take until your 40's before you have recouped the costs.
So if you are going to University for fiscal reasons, you are an idiot. Knowledge should be gained for the sake of gaining knowledge.
As for intellectual property being damaging? Well, one has to look no further than the genetically modified crop market. Currently we are in a situation where people are able to sell crops that are not independently tested. Due to their copywrited nature, those who produce them only allow scientists who are willing to sign NDA's to do any research into the crop to see if it actually does anything. Only studies proving the effectiveness of the seed are allowed to be published, the nature of intellectual copy write prevents the free exchange of scientific papers within this area.
That is but one example of how intellectual copyright is damaging to the entire world.
If anyone, and I mean anyone with the ability to study such things, was allowed to look at the genetic makeup of those seeds, science would advance at a much higher pace. Copyright is, by the by, utterly damaging. During the push to sequence the human genome one of the greatest factors with regards to the speed of publicly funded scientists was attempting to beat (With great success, thankfully) privately funded scientists. For if a private company had managed to sequence the genome first they would have been able to copy write the sequence and put an artificial barrier of cost in the way of all further research, genetic testing, you name it.
When you look at the pharmaceutical industry you see these damages even further. Medicines, which could be made for between 10 and 15 dollars, are sold for hundreds (In some cases, thousands) of dollars due to the nature of intellectual property. People die due to an inability to afford medicines that could be made for a fraction of the cost if these forced copyrights simply did not exist.
So that is a bunch of examples how intellectual property utterly fucks science.
Intellectual property stunts the growth of science. With regards to music and books it is different, true, but the idea that someone can own a tool that is required for learning, forcing schools and libraries to fork out hundreds of thousands of pounds in order to attain a decent amount of copies of a simple textbook, when textbooks are required to teach, is insane. It prevents the growth of new ideas, you name it.
I guess this mainly comes down to morality. I believe it is morally wrong to prevent people from learning, from studying, morally wrong to put artificial roadblocks in the way of scientific research (I do not consider ethics to be an artificial roadblock, mind), it is damaging for science and, as a direct result, damaging for the entire planet.
kickassfrog said:
Mr F. said:
Pirates are "Good" for the economy, a study done in Switzerland showed that pirates habitually spend more on media than non-pirates.
Find me a link to the study, otherwise this is inadmissible as evidence.
Well, I could not find a link to the actual study. I believe it was in one of my old copies of new scientist. What with moving around a whole bunch prior to uni I lost most of my collection. The only copy I can find is a few weeks old and centered around why inequality is not evolutionarily selected for and how inequality drives groups, tribes, nations, empires. Which, admittedly, is not really relevant to the argument. Even if I were to argue that the inability to share drives inequality.
However, I did find the following:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/2012/01/sopa_stopping_online_piracy_would_be_a_social_and_economic_disaster_.html - This argues that stopping piracy would be bad for the economy. I skim read it though, it is more of a blog and not exactly admissible as evidence towards the study I was attempting to draw attention to but it does make a few valuable points.
As for some of my other reasoning behind piracy not being a negative force in the least, well, read above.
It does not take much thinking overall to work out how piracy is not necessarily a force for bad. At worst it is simply neutral. I mean, using music as my example, who here owns an entire library purely made up of music they themselves has bought? Who here has never shared a song with anyone, never listened to an unofficial youtube song (Back in the day, anyway, most of them have been slashed, you get the idea). Chances are each and every one of us has benefited from piracy in some way at some point down the line.
Sharing is a natural human instinct. All of us share. Sharing is good, hell, it is one of the few things that seem to be taught to all kids, regardless of background! Sharing is caring, share your toys, stuff like that.
I guess a lot of my points in this post are more relevant to science and pirating non-fiction, but hell, those are the two most important things around these days.
As for music?
*goes to look up how much muscians earn from CD sales when compared to concerts/gigs*
Well, fuck, I will just use myself as an example (I know I am not representative of the entire music-listening community but still, the internet is going too slowly to do any research).
I was introduced to an artist called Frank Turner through an unoffical youtube video by a close friend. I instantly fell in love with his music and started listening to everything he had made at that point.
Following this, my friend lent me a USB stick with his music on it. At the time that was a single album. I checked up on things and next time he was in town I went to see him at the Cornerhouse. I believe that first ticket cost me something like 7 pounds. A few years later he came back to where I was living to do another gig. The tickets had inflated somewhat along with his rise to semi-stardom and cost me 35 pounds each (I bought one for my then girlfriend). If it was not for piracy, for copywrite infringement, I would have never been introduced to him. And never spent over 70 pounds on tickets to see him, which far outstrips the amount I would have spent had I bought every album he has made (Or even every song as a single from itunes). If it was not for me having those tracks, I would not have been able to introduce more people to his music, get more people to go to his gigs (And in some cases, like my parents, get more people to buy his CD's). From this single (Totally pointless) example I can show how piracy got me, in particular, to spend lots of money to see such an amazing artist.
Hell, My sister and her bloke have everything by Muse on both of their ipods. All of which was downloaded illegally. Because they love Muse so much they proceeded to go to a Muse gig in London for their 5 year anniversary, with tickets that cost in excess of one hundred pounds a pop. Sure, they were listening to "Stolen" music at home, yet they still spent far more than the price of every album on seeing Muse live.
I am done with utterly anecdotal evidence.
tldr;
Intellectual property harms science and the world as a whole as a result, listening to music which has been shared is not damaging in the least to Musicians, people spend far more on going to gigs than on music. I understand that if someone never goes to gigs and only listens to pirated music they are not exactly helping the music industry but hell, they are still introducing more people to the music and whatnot and this could, in turn, lead to greater profits than the sales of the CD's alone ever would.
EDIT: http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/music-royalties2.htm This article neatly explains just how little muscians make from their music. I didnt post it at the start cause my internet is incredibly weak.
, I just understand if people where doing it, for the right reasons.
