The way we (obviously not all of us) think about culture is pretty fundamentally flawed IMHO. Copyright exists only to create incentive to produce more copyrighted works(aka culture) and not explicitly make anyone money. Culture can't, and shouldn't be contained. When you release a song, movie, drawing, game, some source code, you've given it to the world. You took everything the world gave you, got inspired, worked hard, and gave back. To think that you in some way own those vibrations, or light recordings, or bits is kind of childish. You've been granted a temporary monopoly on their production and that is all.
Should you make some money? Absolutely, but pretending like anyone actually owns any intellectual property is a mental deficiency induced by our childish need for control.
In the face of unprecedented sharing, all culture producing industries are thriving. More money comes out of movies, music, games, and other software than ever before. So anyone that really thinks that they can create culture and then own it can cram it.
While I take anything the RIAA says with a brick of salt, I am very curious how they know hard drive swapping is a bigger source of piracy than P2P. This boggles my mind. Is there some underground network of hard drives that I'm not aware of?
Would they buy terabytes of music? No, but few people of any income level would. However it should be remembered that once upon a time, college students were a major market for recorded music.
Twenty years ago when I went to college (ugh, that felt weird to type) every dorm room had stacks of CDs in it... maybe an average of a couple hundred dollars worth per head. That music-selling bonanza just doesn't exist today.
I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another about whether this is a good or bad thing.
"Data note: The information in this press release is from NPD’s “Annual Music Study,” which is based on online surveys of U.S. consumers age 13 and older. NPD conducted consumer surveys between December 14, 2011 and January 3, 2012, and the final reporting is based on 5,799 completed surveys. In order to compare music acquisition across formats, NPD uses an equivalency of 10 standalone digital tracks for each CD album."[0]
I would guess they were counting all USB storage devices as "hard drives", so a large percentage is likely just USB sticks.
This type of piracy is pretty prevalent in military bases around the world. Someone has a flash drive or external hard drive full of movies/music/etc and they trade it amongst themselves.
In the US (where the RIAA operates), the levy only applies to CD-Rs that are labeled as being for "Music." Standard CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs, and so forth aren't covered.
Interesting to see that P2P has gone down 6% and downloads up 3%, whereas physical media has stayed the same. It's clear where the growth market is, now the RIAA just has to read their own numbers.
The one thing that puzzles me is that the numbers for burning have gone up. Who in the time of wireless networking, huge disk drives and USB sticks burns a DVD? I just can't see this segment growing 6% in a year.
In collage someone passed around a pirated DVD of "Shawn of the Dead" in class. Everyone just put in their dvd-rom (feels so weird saying dvd-rom / disc drive) copied it, and then passed it along to the next person till most of the 80 guys in the room had it. Not to mention the sharing that went on over home wireless networks. Each student would share their music / video / software folders and make them public to anyone on their LAN. You could then browse their collection and copy over whatever you wanted. That's not something stoppable.
Sharing is an evolutionary trait among humans, we have an inner instinct to share the things we find useful with others. Despite the bullshit excuses and justifications and delusional utopian ideology that many file sharers babble about, it can and does cause damage. However, p2p file sharing is an extraordinary distribution platform. Maybe even the most efficient, effective, wide reaching distribution platform for anything digital. If we can design with it in mind and find a way to monetize around it / despite it, I think we can all live happily ever after. For instance, Star Wars made more money from the merchandise than it ever did with the films. Even if all the star wars films were made free to the public, it still would have still made massive amounts of profit. Not all movie franchises can follow that path but it is a creative alternative and proof-of-concept that you can make money from movies without charging for the movie itself.
In other worlds, use freely distributed digital content to advertise and solicit sales of real world products & services.
The reality is that the classical concept of copyright, where it is illegal to make a copy of a covered work without authorization from the rightsholder, cannot be enforced in a digital world. The further reality is that people are not motivated by the moral argument that consumer-facing copyright law is an intrinsic good that must be universally respected.
Together, this means that no one is going to heed that aspect of copyright law. We have to adapt. There are still plenty of ways to make money on intellectual property, but it's time to just let go of this concept that piracy can or should be fought. It's an outmoded idea that has been shown irrelevant in a world of instantaneous, perfect replicas.
Big media is throwing a fit because it doesn't know what else to do and causing all kinds of collateral damage to both legal and technical systems in the process. We need to face facts and just tell them to calm down, grow up, and accept that their old business model doesn't work in the new frontier of widespread content digitization.
I think there is still a place for commercial copyright. I think that one can still make a bunch of money selling access to copyrighted material. It's still enforceable and reasonable to sue Studio A if they use content from Studio B in their latest blockbuster without a license. This is much, much different than downloading a movie instead of driving to the rental store.
Old media is constantly screwing themselves over by choosing to pour money into legislative influence and lawsuits instead of innovative content delivery platforms that could be bringing in $50+/mo/user. Right now, all that potential revenue is lost because the studios are so busy hoarding their material that often unauthorized channels are the only places that content is easily available.
The attempts that have been made suck; the TV people don't want to let go of ads as a revenue stream, prohibitive DRM and lockdown everywhere and on everything, forced to use Flash Player to watch video, forced to use special adapters to access content as desired, etc. It seems these people are just incapable of an objective analysis of the consequences and realities of digitization. Are there any ways we can help inform and create meaningful distinctions, or do we just have to wait until everyone with an irrational attachment to the old tricks of the trade retires?
I'm not sure exactly why, but we have a tendency to tie together three not necessarily connected issues.
One is the question of whether there are viable alternative business models complimented by free distribution of traditionally copyright protected content.
The second is whether we can sustain copyright in the digital age.
The third is the moral questions.
People are always mixing and matching from these. Objecting to a morality point with a business one or somesuch. I'll grant that often there are legitimate cross-overs, but a lot of the time its just absurd. If someone thinks copying art is like stealing from someones house, how can you retort with an alternative business model.
Would you suggest that if passers by keep stealing oranges from a tree the owner should accept it & try to sell them orange juice subscriptions?
If new technology made rape much harder to prevent and prosecute, would we suggest women readjust their sexual expectations?
I think copyright is doomed by reality. I think the industries built around copyright will be rattled, resized & otherwise changed but ultimately survive in some new form. I think that copyright infringement is not exactly the same as theft: it's an artificial system of rules that were engineered around a technological & political reality that no longer exist. I also think that the public does not see piracy as morally wrong. These all conveniently unanimous for me. But, they don't have to be. Sometimes conflicts exists.
I believe that heroine criminalisation is morally problematic, creates terrible drug crime. I also think that legalization it would probably lead to increased use and associate problem. It's a conflict.
It can be relevant to answer the moral question with a business argument because the moral question often has economic underpinnings. The idea that copying is equivalent to theft is based on the idea that pirates would otherwise have bought the work, making piracy an indirect financial loss. Creating a new business model that accommodates piracy with equal or better returns resolves the fundamental moral issue. (Whether that's possible is beyond me, though.)
There is, of course, the completely separate moral issue of the rights of artists to control their work. Business arguments are inappropriate there.
If copying is equivalent to theft new business model that accommodates piracy with equal or better returns does not solve the moral problem. It solves the business problem.
If copying is equivalent to theft, the copyright owner has similar rights to property owners. Can a property owner have his stuff stolen if allowing it gives them some other financial advantage. What about the right to control how their work is sold? What about the right to stop selling? This isn't just theoretical. For example, Prince wants to exercise these rights.
OK, but I don't understand where you're going with this. Some people think digital piracy is bad, maybe even "equivalent to theft" of real world artifacts. Most people familiar with technology don't agree with them. As such, our society is not obliged to grant these unnatural monopolistic "rights". Do you want to argue that copyright is equivalent to theft, or do you just want to point out that people who hold an alternate view of copyright are going to be upset when the laws inevitably catch up with society? Of course, there are some people who are going to be unhappy no matter what happens.
I recognize your point that even though the artists feel they are making equivalent or more money than previously, they can still feel wronged when something that is contrary to their concept of copyright occurs. But like I said, I'm not really sure where you intend to go from there.
>If new technology made rape much harder to prevent and prosecute, would we suggest women readjust their sexual expectations?
No, which is why I wrote:
>The further reality is that people are not motivated by the moral argument that consumer-facing copyright law is an intrinsic good that must be universally respected.
and discussed what happens when this collides with the impossibility of enforcement. In the case of rape, there would still be a widespread communal response to ostracize rapists, develop counter-technologies, etc., because normal people will not just sit idly by and accept the fact that they can't do anything about rapists. Somehow they just don't find the concept of lost sales as noble.
Copyright infringement is not the same as theft because theft forcibly removes a thing. Copyright protects against whole and independent copies that have no bearing on the physical item (whether a real, bound book or a string of digits stored on a disc). This is why people are charge with "copyright infringement" instead of "burglary" when they violate copyright law.
You're right that I didn't address each point independently and consistently. I didn't believe this is necessary; my post wasn't about the moral implications of copyright adherence or copyright violation or why some people believe it's theft, but about the practicalities and futility of Big Media's "fight against piracy". I think it's a legitimate mashup. The only moral argument I referenced was simply that people do not believe copyright should prevent them from downloading content, and that was only a sentence or so.
> The reality is that the classical concept of copyright, where it is illegal to make a copy of a covered work without authorization from the rightsholder, cannot be enforced in a digital world
The laws of classical physics failed us at the micro scale. We had to come up with new ones to handle the changes in forces at that level. The present state of copyright will have to be supplemented or replaced with new laws to handle the scale at which things happen digitally.
I think they are missing the point here: each track was paid for, but shared twice (on average). Perhaps music rentals and broadcast would paint a fuller picture?
As soon as we have the technology to monitor's everyone's moves offline and see what they do or think, you can bet RIAA will try to use it. Hopefully they don't exist anymore by then.
I tried lots of mixtapes :) It was hit or miss. :-\ I married the girl I gave a mix CD to though! ;-) That was almost 10 years ago. Kids these days have it so easy. They have software to match beats and do perfect mixes... back in the day it was a real talent to produce a smooth mixtape! Probably the next thing is to give her a streaming music subscription lol.. too easy
Should you make some money? Absolutely, but pretending like anyone actually owns any intellectual property is a mental deficiency induced by our childish need for control.
In the face of unprecedented sharing, all culture producing industries are thriving. More money comes out of movies, music, games, and other software than ever before. So anyone that really thinks that they can create culture and then own it can cram it.