I downloaded a lot when I was a student, when I began to work I decided I did not have the "I'm poor" excuse any more and I began buying CDs of bands I like. I stopped buying CDs after I got my first DRMed one. I thought "ok, this is stupid, I don't want to be part of this any more".

Only recently I have discovered the real harm that copyright laws and lobbyists are doing to the society. They are criminalising sharing. Think a bit about it. We have to stand against them. Now there are copyright restrictions on SCIENCE papers. It is effectively a danger to our society.

Here in France a law was proposed to display on CDs price tag how much the artist receives when you buy a CD. It was voted down by lobbyists' minions. That alone says a lot.

    > It might make you feel better about it, but it really
    > doesn't change the fact that you're stealing something
    > of value 

Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).

I assume there will be counter-arguments/downvotes, so to elaborate on this point using my own arguments:

If you steal something from me, I don't have it (as in "steal a car"), so you're putting me in a worse-off position. If you copy/pirate something that is mine (properly copy, with attribution, and not out of context), I am not worse-off (possibly even better-off, as I get more widely known, more famous).

Some compare pirating a DVD with going to a masseuse/prostitute and not paying her/him afterwards. This analogy is not correct - the expectation/social contract is that I have to pay you after I receive a service, and if I don't pay you, you are worse-off because you don't have money that you would otherwise have. However, people that pirate movies/music are not automatically lost revenue - probably they would buy less than 10% (just a guess) of entertainment content that they download/consume through piracy.

So then, what if I am willing to pay for it?

I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.

If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.

So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!

I would gladly pay double the price for Netflix Canada if the service was as good as it is in the states. I don't mind paying for something if it provides me a good service, but it doesn't. Netflix canada is a steaming pile.

So, "Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future." is impossible because if big companies like Netflix can't even do it, no amount of money is going to help the situation.

EDIT: Turns out it's canada's fault, not the us's when it comes to why we don't get hulu/netflix/etc.

If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.

If it's not available I have no real issue with getting it illegally.

Frankly if the media companies adopted day and date releases worldwide for content and worked to make their back catalogues widely available through convenient means (by which iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on count) a lot of the best arguments in favour of piracy dry up.

You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:

"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."

Why do you seek out and watch the content made by people you violently despise?

When I explain that I don't really like piracy I get some very strange looks.

I think people often overestimate how many people are willing to consider ethics at all in purchasing decisions. I know plenty of otherwise nice and decent people who would happily purchase a product that they knew was made by child slavery, hell people even joke about it.

It seems that considering the consequences of your actions isn't hip anymore once consumerism is involved.

Do you also apply this principle to sex?

What about borrowed books, good views, jokes, ideas, intelligent conversation, exercise?

You have a right to exercise. You don't have the right to walk into Gold's Gym and use their facilities without paying. I don't have the right to enter your home and use the equipment in the basement.

You have a right to have mutually consensual sex with someone else without paying. You don't have the right to rape a prostitute if they only offer sex for money because you didn't want to pay. I don't have the right to demand sex from your family.

You have the right to borrow a book from your friend if he's willing to lend it to you. You don't have the right to borrow your buddy's book without their permission just as you don't have the right to walk into a bookstore and borrow their books without permission. I don't have the right to take your books from you.

Yes people can choose to make their work available for free, and that's great. But that choice again lies in the person who created the work, not the person who consumes it.

And to be perfectly clear, I have no delusion that piracy will ever go away. It's a fact of the digital world. My point is pirates should not delude themselves into thinking what they do is justified. It's not.

Copying isn't stealing, so yea, it's different.

As for the final paragraph, all of those are rather easily solved by realizing that information will be copied whether you like it or not. If you don't want it out there, don't release it. Fake government monopolies on information copying is a dying model, the death throws of the old guard trying to cope with a world they don't understand. Information will be free, eventually.

city41 wrote "If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it." in the context that "it" is copyrighted work that is offered for sale, not just anything. You know it as well as everyone here.

But I do believe that if somebody has something you want and they only offer to you for a price (be it money or otherwise), you don't have a right to it for free, pretty much whatever "it" is. (assuming they have the right to that control in the first place obviously) See biot's comment for eloquent point-by-point explanation.

Why? Where did that right comes from. Who legislates enjoyment? Or are you saying it is a moral law?

(Studies have shown that the sales-displacing effect of piracy in music ranges from 42% to no effect at all[1]. If all piracy could be prevented, that's an awfully large deadweight loss)

[1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~rtelang/SmithTelang.pdf

In this case $0 or even a negative value amount is what you can plug into something. Why? Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.

However, what they pay with is with their time and attention.

I used to know someone who managed a movie theater. He would sneak us into movies quite often. Good and bad. And quite often after coming out of the movie I felt like wanting "my free back".

Let's say an artist is unknown and I am a customer that has quite a few connection ( a blog with a large following perhaps ). Then what would make sense is for me to pay a negative amount ( the artist would pay me to spend my time listening to his new cool record in the hopes that I might spread the news about it ).

FWIW, the only album I've paid for in years was a pay-what-you-want deal. I paid something like $3. Which was all that was left in my bank account after I paid my rent and bought groceries for that month - I'm a college student.

Do you have any evidence that the costs outweigh the benefits?

And without exception, all of those "pirates" that I know have much larger legal bluray and record collections than I do.

A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her.

When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. (yes, you can say it does indirectly through some convoluted story, but that's always debatable)

The future economy will be more about directly personalized experiences and services that cannot be copied, or are much less interesting when copied, instead of trivial fan-outs of information. It is all about scarcity. Better to let that sink in than try to preserve what is already lost, at the cost of freedom.

(edit: why do I say future? It is already the present for many of us)

But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio.

> It is all about scarcity.

Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.

You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship.

Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.

Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.

Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case.

Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes.

Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.

Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways.

Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past.

Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince.

A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though.

Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough".

There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk.

Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense.

Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in.

These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities:

1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do).

2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough").

3. Fail.

None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.

I think that was a common sentiment at the end of each "age". How to go from here, all the alternatives suck from our point of view. I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.

But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.

At a certain point, the ends don't justify the means anymore. DMCA was ok-ish, but I think we reached that point with SOPA and similar laws. Especially as those means are the same as can be used to censor other things, and will very likely be abused for that, with the militarization happening all over the world.

So that solution falls under (3) fail as well. Which leaves the other options, including those we haven't thought of yet. People are creative and will find ways to get by...

I think there's potential there, but there would need to be a dramatic cultural shift so it didn't just become a case of anything "good enough" was done, with no meaningful incentive to put the final polish to turn good works into great ones. Take a look at the Open Source software community today: it's full of "good enough" products, which do the basic jobs perfectly well for a lot of people, but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.

> But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.

Unfortunately, that isn't really true. It would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology. It's just that I (and, I suspect, most other people here) would prefer not to accept the unfortunate side-effects that come with compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges.

Yes, the edge cases, the personalization, the polishing. There will always be work in that. Adapting systems to their specific surroundings. Every place, every person is unique, and has specific demands. That's what I meant with the cookie-cutter stuff going away.

it would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology

Sure, but is just as easy to avoid copyright enforcement with the current technology. And for those desperate there is always the analog hole. That kind of summarizes the DRM "war".

compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges

Because that'd effectively be an Orwellian world. So we'd need to go to a total surveillance state, centrally controlled world, just to make sure things keep working as they do now. Just to make some people happy at the expense of the rest. That's not only inhuman, but very unstable as well.

"Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways."

This is not a strong argument. I could equally look at the time of the enlightenment and say "if people weren't forced to give their money to the Catholic church, think of all the lovely buildings and choral music we'd be denied. Therefore - people should be forced to give money to the church!"

In the case of copyright, you need to consider this opportunity cost. i.e. things we don't have because copyright has made them impossible. As with the church example, there is also a significant cost of freedom.

There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.

Which you haven't cited, I notice.

If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards. Obviously you can give lots of examples where this has been done successfully to back up your case, then?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...

    > Which you haven't cited, I notice.

I'll take another angle. Live-and-let live should be the default case. Copyright is an intrusion on this. If someone wants to drive a tank through freedom by introducing something like copyright, then the onus is on the tank drivers to make the case that the benefits justify the intrusion on freedom.

I've never seen a remotely reasonable attempt at putting that case. The best you get is claims that people wouldn't produce things unless they had vast legal protections and that's plainly false. Mendelssohn wrote symphonies. I write code, in a commercial setting, with copyright not being the justification for it.

Handel is an even better example, because it's well documented that he rearranged lots of previous stuff. We wouldn't have any record of some of those earlier tunes had he not repurposed them in his own works. Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ could not be performed or distributed under current western-world copyright law.

"If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards."

When you have copyright law it creates a powerful lobby group and any attempt at reform will come up against them. Much as with my discussion about the church above - an institution that impeded progress and freedom, but which fought ferociously to retain privilege at every step.

What could cause the dam to break would be a major economic slump and a desperate move to try something new to attract smart people. Or something like SOPA may be a step too far, and cause Sweden or New Zealand or Singapore or a special economic zone in China to make a play at being a free-state-style intellectual capital.

If you only have to pay the price of one day's lunch for access to a library of content, then downloading a title rather than watching it on its official outlet will reduce subscription fees and thus impact revenue sharing. So rather than buying less than 10%, there may in fact be no threshold at which pirating becomes more practical, once the initial monetary threshold (being able to afford the subscription fee) is met.

Therefore, copyright infringement can result in a much stronger loss in revenue than you presume, even though I personally agree that it doesn't constitute "stealing", as no physical good has been removed and appropriated illegally. However, what that copyright infringement can do is impede or obstruct certain consumer-favoring (IMO) business models from being viable.

It's possibly true, in my opinion, that sharing in a gray area of material whose market has not yet matured may increase visibility and have future benefits, but no company which deals with content producers and the platform to deliver content can afford to acknowledge this to the content producers or to the audience without risking legitimizing copyright infringement and therefore delegitimizing their own business (which is why I'm not disclaiming where I work, other than it is familiar with these issues).

Not that I'm arguing that there should be no such thing as sharing, but making the moral argument to justify it that stealing isn't putting the company in a worse position is a poor rationale. It's not true and it's not something that can be defended against in public.

Nor am I arguing that piracy will make or break a business. If it's big enough to be popular, it may be big enough to grow a legitimate market faster than the illegitimate alternative. However, this also relies on cooperative content producers and an audience willing to pay for the content. It's a tricky balance but the reality is that while violation of copyright may not produce economic devastation on its own, neither is it devoid of any impact.

tl;dr: Reasonable people should pay for content available to them that they enjoy, especially when affordable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good -- shut down today in SOPA protest

With a club good there is a tangible thing such as a running machine. By my use of it, you are unable to use it. But we judge the tradeoff to be worth it because we don't each want to go out and buy a gym.

That is unlike copyright where the cost of making a copy is nothing, and may even increase the value of the copied data through network effects.

> Examples of club goods include private golf courses, cinemas, cable television, access to copyrighted works, and the services provided by social or religious clubs to their members.

Also this definition on econport.org;

> Club Goods: Goods that are excludable but non-rival, or non-subtractable. This means that while certain people can be excluded from the consumption of a good, one person's consumption of it does not diminish another person's.

The point is; people say copyright violation is stealing, is isn't stealing, and arguments occur. To have a good conversation about it, it's useful to distinguish club good from private goods, because then we can talk about the difference between "unauthorised access to a club good" (piracy) and "unauthorised posession of a private good" (theft).

Sure, let's have a very pedentic notion of stealing and keeping framing the debate around 'stealing'.

OK... "taking something which isn't yours and/or you don't have permission to take". In most minds, that's the same as stealing, hence the standard use of the word 'stealing'. But substitute the phrase above for 'stealing' and, imo, it becomes harder to justify. Just because I an not doing an actual verifiable economic harm to someone doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but doesn't make it right either.

    - Copyright Act of 1790 - established U.S. copyright 
      with term of 14 years with 14-year renewal
    - Copyright Act of 1831 - extended the term to 
      28 years with 14-year renewal
    - Copyright Act of 1909 - extended term to 28 years 
      with 28-year renewal
    - Copyright Act of 1976 - extended term to either 
      75 years or life of author plus 50 years 
    - Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 
      removed the requirement for renewal
    - Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994 
      restored U.S. copyright for certain foreign works
    - Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended terms 
      to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years
    - Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 
      criminalized some cases of copyright infringement

So you can talk about right versus wrong, good versus evil and so on, but clearly something stinks about this picture, which is why I don't blame "pirates" for justifying their acts, as their acts are justified.

And, how fucked up is it that restaurants are afraid of singing "Happy Birthday to You"? Are those singing it thieves?

But copyright infringement is not stealing. You could make an argument about it if the period was still 14 years (i.e. the author has only 14 years to collect revenue from it, so if you want it either pay up or wait 14 years, which is doable). But that's not the case.

Also, discussing the morality of copyright infringement is also important, as copyright infringement does not rob the owner of the item itself. It only duplicates it.

I'd argue that property exists because things (apples, cars, gym equipment) have limitations on their use. If I eat an apple, you can't. If you grow a crop on this property, you can't. While he uses this gym equipment, they can't.

Even in historical contexts where there has been no effective government (silk road, dark ages iceland), ideas of property have evolved that are strikingly consistent, because it extends from realities of the world.

As states developed, they came to give stronger definition to property law. But then people who were well-connected to government decided that it would be a good idea to extend these convenient powers to things which were not property, sometimes by falsely labeling them as property.

So it comes down to who has control over the language.

Is property a distinct idea, or is it just a bundle of whatever rights the government of the day declares it to be.

And if you choose the latter, if the government says that black is white, is it so?

I'd like to extend on this concept and add ownership into equation.

In the example with an apple. I own it, therefore only I can eat it. It is my property. Now what happens if I give the apple to somebody else? It's their property now, so you would naturally assume they own it? And therefore they can eat it.

Alas, it's not the case with music/etc. I bought a CD with music, but it appears that I don't own it. I cannot listen to it in public (Happy Birthday to You), nor I can give it to someone else (lend DVD to a friend for a pint).

So this doesn't work out very well, the CD is my property, but I don't own it? To me owning means having right to do whatever I please with it. Imagine if blending an iPhone would become a criminal offence...

I'll try to explain what I mean by anti-right though I'm unpracticed here.

(1) Society is oriented around a presumption of live-and-let-live. Most laws give rights that state the boundary of live-and-let live, and these are positive rights.

(2) In the case of copyright, only the creator has the ability to live-and-let-live in the context of the protected thing: everyone else is restricted from it. Hence, this is a negative right, or "anti-right".

When rights and anti-rights clash, you get nasty situations develop where they can't all be true at the same time.

i.e. in order to make IP anti-rights work, the laws need to inhibit 'real' property rights.

i.e. I am not allowed to do things with magnetic signals in the privacy of my own home because that impedes an anti-right that the government has granted to someone else.

If you build complex software with a permissions model that contains both positive and negative permissions (i.e. where a user has a permission that is "can't see" something rather than being a positive right), you'll find similar nasty situations develop.

Obviously this is a strange concept since the contents of the CD are a physical part of the CD itself.

If you ever have something stolen from you, you'll quickly realize the difference between theft and copyright infringement.

Debates such as these keep orbiting around the definition of stealing because the term keeps getting used for copyright infringement out of lazy thinking or in order to facilitate an agenda.

Stealing is intrinsically "wrong" from a societal perspective because it puts those who take by force into a better position than those who earn by earning it, which is not sustainable.

Whether anyone is put into a worse position by copyright infringement (e.g. in the form of illegal downloading of music) is up for debate. But any serious debate should avoid the term stealing to describe the issue at hand.

It's not taking, either.

You're not using your flat, it's there anyway, you've not lost anything, nothing has been broken or damaged, he's gone before you're back so it's fine right?

Let's use another example. I order food, but don't eat all I get. If you will eat it, I would be very glad, as it wouldn't go to waste.

After all, at the time they created it the legal and commercial framework, as well as the social norms, said that they could expect payment from anyone who consumed their work.

Why are you allowed to override their expectations yet someone using your property without your permission isn't allowed to override yours?

Of course this leaves out the production costs entirely and probably a whole lot more. I'm not an economist, but I think this is a fatal flaw in the business model of most entertainment companies.

I left the costs etc out of the equation, which is obviously a wrong thing to do.

From Wikipedia: . . . supply is determined by marginal cost. Firms will produce additional output as long as the cost of producing an extra unit of output is less than the price they will receive.

. . . demand curves are determined by marginal utility curves. Consumers will be willing to buy a given quantity of a good, at a given price, if the marginal utility of additional consumption is equal to the opportunity cost determined by the price, that is, the marginal utility of alternative consumption choices. The demand schedule is defined as the willingness and ability of a consumer to purchase a given product in a given frame of time.

In my experience, the pro-piracy argument from economics is at best an imperfect understanding of supply and demand and at worst, the person making the argument just heard the words "supply and demand" and filled in the rest from his own imagination. The "Law of Supply and Demand" is not an actual thing. It's the juxtaposition of "Law of Supply" and the "Law of Demand"

Supply (as opposed to the supply curve) is dictated by demand, not the other way around. If the demand for a good rises, then supply will be increased to meet the demand. If demand for a good drops, supply will be decreased to the level of demand.

To your question, the entertainment companies are under no illusions that the demand curve for any particular product is going to stay the same. They expect that over time, the demand for any given thing will decrease. They know that Britney Spears new album will sell a shit-ton of copies for the first week after it drops and by the same time the following year, everyone who wanted it will have it and sales will be virtually non-existant. Their business model is geared toward a limited lifecycle for any given product, which is why they make continual investments in new products.

With regard to your second point, I again argue that there needs to be a separation between the debate over how copyright holders operate and the legalities of piracy. Failure to do that means that the analysis breaks down when we're not talking about the big evil conglomerate music companies that screw artists over and everybody loves to hate. Do you feel comfortable with your assertions above if we're talking about an indie game developer, or TextMate author Allan Odgaard?

We need to emphasize that filesharing is a form of sampling for most people, and that they would never buy 99% of the content that they fileshare for free, and that they often do buy that 1%, and that even if the consumer doesn't buy your content/distribution, you're still better off for the potential word-of-mouth promotion and other exposure facilitated.

In reality, filesharing operates on the same principles as YouTube, which the studios and record companies also attempted to kill as just another pirate avenue before it was legitimized by Google and entered mainstream acceptance; they now (mostly) see YouTube as a promotional platform with the same understanding that it's about "sampling", that most people won't buy 99% of the stupid videos they watch on YouTube, but that some people will buy that 1%. The RIAA/MPAA members use YouTube in hopes that their content will be that 1% that provokes individuals to go purchase related merchandise.

The only difference is that YouTube makes the "filesharing" piece invisible and people feel that they are sharing videos instead of files, and this makes YouTube tenable for mainstream use. BitTorrent and other filesharing networks operate on the same set of principles, but they are harder to use and control, so they remain targeted when there is essentially no difference from a consumer standpoint other than barrier to entry.

No, it's more akin to various kinds of fraud. So that's OK then, I guess.

> Separately, the person who worked hard to produce whatever you're buying is reaping a fraction of a percentage point of whatever you're spending, and that's only if the distributor hasn't found a way to screw them out of that entirely (or else they've been long since dead).

That is simply nonsense. Even musicians signed to the big record labels or authors whose books are distributed by major publishers do a lot better than that if their work is a success. Artists using small-time/independent distributors can do better, and these days plenty of works are self-published and self-promoted, sending the lion's share of the profit back to the artist.

If an artist is getting screwed by a label/studio is a problem between them and the label/studio. If, as a consumer, you feel bad for the artist, I don't think the solution is to pirate the work, but instead to let the artist and label/studio know you want to support the artist and not the label/studio and thus be a consumer for things that you feel are more fair to the artist. (e.g. concerts?)

The artist might have unfortunately sold some of their rights to the label/studio for exposure, promotion, etc. and in return don't get as much money as they (or the consumers) think they deserve. Next time, they'll probably deal with a different label/studio…

In fact, it's very similar to the situations between entrepreneurs and VCs… you take some money, sell some rights because that's your only way to make it big. Once you make it big, you might realize that you got screwed and think you deserved more. Next time, you'll either still have made enough money/fame to strike it on your own, or you'll work with better VCs.

But artists do get just a tiny part of the money people pay. Take TLC as a well known example: they were a huge seller, yet they got bankrupt, largely because of how their record company treated them:

>CrazySexyCool eventually sold over 11 million copies in the US, and became one of the first albums to ever receive a diamond certification from the RIAA, and won a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Album and a 1996 Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group for "Creep". However, in the midst of their apparent success, the members of TLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 3, 1995. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLC_%28band%29)

Take Courtney Love's rant about where the money goes as another (well known) example: http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

I agree with the OP: I'm sure that if they could get away with it, the record companies would most definitely prefer to pay the artist nothing at all.

The challenges are about control of limited distribution and promotion channels. This is a vicious territory and a zero-sum game. This helps to explain why that space cultivates nasty people. The sort of person who would have no qualms about grinding an artist down as much as possible.

There's an endless supply of naive, highly skilled, high-ego artists who will do anything to get a 'contract' to get access to distribution. Money is not a key motivator to these people, but some might like the traditional media model if it gives their produce an advantage over equally skilled but less connected mindshare competitors. This is particularly true where the performing artist is just a front for a composition and marketing team.

Fasion is an industry with a similar dynamic to media, but even less emphasis on the quality of content. And - surprise surprise - it's famously dominated by a nasty kind of person.

What you're saying sounds to me like artists don't deserve to get a larger share because what they do simply isn't the most difficult part of actually making money.

At the end of the day it may just be a completely normal function of supply and demand. Many people can easily supply what mainstream radio stations play all day long.

    > What are these "distribution and promotion channels" limited by?

If you want to create and sell CDs then you can do this now. I've got friends who self-publish "classical" music performances and make (not much) money from it by getting good reviews in trade magazines and selling CDs at concerts. Or you could give your music away and sell mugs and tshirts and tickets to performances.

Or there's the model that city-based orchestras do - make margin by selling tickets to concerts and having a distribution agreement with a local music shop or radio network for recordings. e.g. http://www.aso.com.au/recordings.html

When you steal a car, that one car is stolen. No big deal. If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down. This is because most people will quickly and easily be able to get it for free. Revenue will go down as a result of this and instead of having the loss of an individual copy of that product, the entire product line loses money. Something that just doesn't happen with physical products.

The same principal can be applied to the news: Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.

Do you have any evidence to support this? Both the movie [0] and gaming [1] industries are making record profits.

>Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.

Well, not exactly. I assume you're referring to consuming news online, which is supported by advertising -- it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution.

[0] -- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...

[1] -- http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/06/gaming-expected-t...

Being involved in multiple small companies. When we allowed cracks to work, sales slowly went down to nothing. When the cracks were stopped, low-and-behold, sales went back up because people weren't able to get it for free. I've seen it too many times to think it's a coincidence. Huge companies like Microsoft and Adobe can take the hit, but a small company will be destroyed.

"it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution."

So you are telling me that the fact that I can get pretty much all my news for free (from hundreds of sources) has no effect on a company that tries to sell me the same thing for a few dollars?

I never said it was piracy. I was saying that it's an example of the same effect: When something is easily available for free, less people will end up purchasing it.

In addition to this, when piracy goes unchecked it creates a culture of acceptance (IE: it's not a bad thing) and less people will end up buying.

Everyone loves to defend piracy and yet many of those same people hate big corporations. It's a funny thing because eventually, that's all that will be left.

I no longer get involved with apps. I only do web services. It's better for me because I now get monthly reoccurring income. Eventually, I think most companies will go this route and piracy will be a non-issue.

What exactly is stolen? Certainly not the piece of music, film, or knowledge: unlike spaghetti, those are abundant, non-conflicting goods. Nor the exclusivity, for it is only destroyed. Nor secrecy or privacy, for the piece of knowledge or art is public already.

This is not theft. This is infringing a state granted monopoly. It doesn't make it a good idea, mind you. Upholding the law is generally a good idea. But unlike plain theft, it's not obviously wrong either.

grellas made an excellent post the other day about the nature of physical property rights vs intangible property rights [1]. The general gist is that declaring one "fundamental" and the other "not-fundametal" is sophistry; both are considered important to society and both are and will continue to be protected by law.

In my opinion, the existence of both physical and IP property rights is a social good - it's defining the boundaries of those rights that becomes the tricky part. I don't think we're hitting the right balance worldwide at the moment, but I also don't think we should be swinging violently towards SOPA or conversely anarchy.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3463640

Grellas is right to point out that current laws turn a range of intellectual goods into property. We shouldn't forget however how they do this: by enforcing scarcity when the default was abundance. By the way, you can get abundance back by breaking the law.

I reject the terms "property" and "theft" when talking about ideas and recordings because they are abundant by default. By using those words, they make you think in terms of scarcity. They skew your perception of the issues, then exploit that bias. This is why I insist that others do not use the word, "it's GNU/Linux" style. Even if you know what you meant, many people don't, and it has consequences. (In the same vein, I remind people not to say "internet" when talking about the world wide web alone. If you believe you "have the internet" as long as you can run a web browser, you won't notice nor protest when your ISP starts blocking TCP ports.)

I also reject copyright and patents altogether. Not because they are not property by default, and therefore illegitimate (I find this argument very weak). I reject them because I believe they do more evil than good. Most probably, they are more a hindrance than a help for our economy and our technological development. Not to mention the inevitable loss of individual liberties, which humans tend to value by themselves.

Overall, I believe scarcity should be abolished whenever possible. If we get to the point where there is so much abundance that life is not fun any more, then we'd have a good reason for scarcity. (Video games provide an example: god mode, unlimited ammo, and free experience points tend to spoil the game. I'm still tempted by the cheat codes, but I think twice before I type them.) But right now scarcity is a problem to be solved. Copyright and patents are part of that problem (or at least a symptom).

I understand your point about artificial scarcity and appreciate that you find copyrights and patents a net detriment rather than a net benefit. In the current scheme of things, I would have to agree with you on that point in some instances (especially with respect to software patents, many pharmaceutical patents, and the length of copyright). Overall, however, I believe that the idea of intellectual property is a sound one that's been distorted over the course of legal history thanks to the influence of powerful rights holders and a lack of ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

So while I personally would rather do without (similar to using Linux/Gimp vs pirating Windows/Photoshop etc.) and think that piracy in many ways strengthens the hand of the copyright owners by suffocating legitimate alternatives (again see Linux/Gimp vs pirated XP/Photoshop) I think that encouraging and legitimizing widespread piracy could well be the only "significant political protest" with any chance to succeed.

Riots and revolutions tend to happen in the summer, maybe copyright will only change if some people get to watch Transformers for free. I can live with that.

If someone argues against copyright, you cannot defend it by invoking 'stealing'. The 'stealing' here is not removing of anything in any normal sense. It is infringement of, or disobedience of, copyright -- which of course would not exist if there were no copyright. There is no basic harm.

You might say it would be difficult to pay for production with other economic arrangements. But that is a matter of comparing economic efficiency; it has nothing to do with stealing.

So given that, you are right, he doesn't refute (1.) (2.) or (3.) at all!

And yes, property is a right, one of far greater importance to political liberty than is generally allowed. And intellectual property is property. The placement of economic activity _outside_ the direct control of the state prevents the state from entirely dominating the society.

Now, SOPA is a really bad bill, because DNS filtering is a free speech nightmare. If you make me choose between speech rights and property rights, I'm taking the speech right, it's the foundation of everything else. The willingness of show biz and its lackeys to mess with speech rights demonstrates a disturbing greed and / or ignorance.

But that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's a complicated world, and technology is revising the everyday realization of our rights and responsibilities. We aren't going to work our way through that with a black-and-white simplification of the debates.

People's rights are man made, so they are debatable.

As you say, rights are often malleable - and reevaluating and redefining them (from both sides of this debate) should be an ongoing process.

You could of course make the case that our democracy is too imperfect to accept the letter of any particular law as a direct expression of the will of the people without applying your further judgement.

Laws can be inconsistent, unjust or inappropriately applied and that's why we have the courts to make those judgements. Unfortunately, access to the courts is very unequal, particularly in the case of civil law. It's always been like this, hence breaking the law has always been the poor man's expensive lawyer and lobbyist at the same time.

Of course this argument could be used as a blanket excuse for breaking any law. Personal judgement just can't be replaced by any system.

Pirating only gives those on the other side the impression and ammunition to say 'we are creating great things that people steal we just need to force them pay.' Not using their works at all is the only way to win.

I'm willing to guarantee that most don't know the labels that most artists belong to. Some are indie and are not involved with the RIAA. Should they be punished as well?

You're not any different from from those you preach against.

If we invent a technology that allows us to read thoughts, should you be allowed to read them without the thinkers permission? The thinker still has their thoughts. What about disseminate them via torrents? Would that be "fair"? Is that the society we want?

What about monitoring conversations via surveillance means? The speakers still have their conversation. Should we be allowed to a) surveil anyone and b) distribute that surveillance digitally as the surveilled still have their conversation?

The time is close approaching where such questions will need to be asked and I see little difference between piracy of songs, movies or other artistic expression and the extraction and distribution of thoughts against the owners wishes. The only real difference is that the artists chose to let it out into the world in a way the pirate didn't like. One way was via concert/itunes/cd/dvd, another way could be a conversation with a friend. Both ways the pirate says they have the right to use it how they want - original thinker be damned.

In my view it comes down to respect. While technically it's not stealing, you're still an asshole for using others thoughts without their blessing.

I can imagine the day where someone hacks into your laptop, records you in a compromising position, shares it with the world and shrugs and says "how is it stealing if you still have that something"? I just copied your dignity.

Not all that can be stolen is a thing.

Certainly relaying those thoughts for free can possibly limit potential opportunities to futher sell the right to 'listen to those thoughts' (assuming that anyone of those listening in for free would be prepared to pay for it). But this 'intellectual rape' thing you are trying to paint here just doesn't hold water since they are already granting permission to 'read their thoughts' for money.

These files containing ip that are being illegally copied all across the web are things which were already being distributed in various forms, albeit with artificial scarcity mechanisms in place to force payment per copy.

Just because they are already granting permission to "read their thoughts" for money doesn't give anyone license to just do what they want does it?

I fail to see how the users choice on how to distribute files grants pirates license to go against the thought originators wishes.

Note I'm not saying I agree with this - but I find it interesting to think about the opposite viewpoint to my own as it helps me rationalise my position.

Good example and I agree. But I think it should be called something else rather than theft. Because one issue with this is how much have you lost after something was copied. That's the law suit side of this. Grandmas are being asked to pay hundreds of thousands of $ because their grand-kids downloaded Lady Gaga songs. By calling it "stealing" they are able to convince juries and judges that this is the equivalent of grandma breaking into a bank and taking $100k worth of gold and then speeding away. You see the problem?

Because that's not a decision you should get to make. The cost associated with creating most things isn't in raw materials alone but man hours that went in to produce it, and the author is entitled to ask for whatever they think their hard work and their end product are worth. Is the benefit of getting that product not worth the price they're asking? Here's a novel idea; you don't buy the product and don't get the benefit. It is worth the price? Then vote with your wallet and buy away. Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.

So who gets to make it. I guess that means you'd agree with MPAA claims some 16 year old kid out there can be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they downloaded a couple of songs. What if they sue them for $100M, is that valid? If the defendant gets to unilaterally re-define and attribute semantics to words and decide what the punishment is do you think that makes sense?

> Saying that they can 'still have that thing' does little to justify why you feel entitled to that thing in the first place.

Why doesn't it. It makes a pretty big difference. Not at the point of transaction but during a dispute. If someone steals your song does it mean you can ask for $100M from them claiming you lost potential profit because it was going to be a hit song. How do you decide what one copy is worth? That is the key question. Sorry, but "it is worth whatever the seller says is worth, is bullshit". If that hypothetical teenager didn't copy the song, do you think the record company would be $100M richer. How do you prove that?