[neilv]

Web site that profits from widespread copyright violation-- decries the flawed legal mechanisms that widespread copyright violation enabled.

DMCA has serious problems in practice, and needs correcting. But the piracy community should not be the ones criticizing every time a merchant ship has a gunpowder accident from the cannons they're required to carry because of the pirates.

[anigbrowl]

Digital piracy took off in part because copyright restrictions were so unreasonable and onerous to begin with. Copyright was last extended to its current absurd length in 1998, and its provisions were retroactive, which is arguably unconstitutional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

[microtherion]

I agree that current copyright terms are too long, but for your causality argument to hold water, the bulk of piracy would have to occur for works older than 17 years (the initial copyright term), and I very much doubt that this is the case.

[neilv]

It took off because people don't want to pay for things if they don't have to, and the rest is mostly rationalization and retconning.

[hakfoo]

I think it took off because we finally saw behind the curtain.

By and large, people could ignore copyright for its first few centuries-- it simply wasn't in the face of most people.

In 1799, or 1899 you couldn't reasonably print a commercial-quality newspaper, novel, or sound recording at home. If there was anything resembling commercial-scale copyright infringement, it was a business-versus-business play, and usually the 'knock-off' product was an obvious inferior substitute, or a clear attempt to defraud buyers. You weren't just paying for the "legitimacy" of official works, you were paying for a product higher quality than you can generate yourself.

By 1999, a normal upper-middle-class consumer could buy some sub-$1000 printers and produce his own copies of documents and photographs that looked as good as anything you got from a publisher. He could get a spindle of CD-Rs in a neighbourhood shop and make audio CDs that played as well as commercial ones.

At that point, the obvious question is "this costs me 75 cents to make at home, what am I paying $15 for?" The answers-- "it's legitimate" or "the artist gets paid, blah, blah", did not prove satisfactory enough. The "artist gets paid" one especially rang hollow when we saw plenty of artists sell millions of $15 records and earn enough in royalties to get a Big Mac but not fries.

Only the fear of prosecution was remotely viable to force people to ignore the question and go back to buying "official" media.

[anigbrowl]

The sad thing is that the 'legitimate' options we have now are arguably even worse - streaming services pay laughably tiny royalties, there's no transparency or consistency, ad supported platforms are markedly worse than broadcast radio/tv were.

[hug]

TorrentFreak is a news site, not a site that enables torrenting per se. That said, your analogy is also flawed: this is not a gunpowder accident, it’s one merchant turning the cannons on the other, and the complaining party is the only one that has been anti-cannon the entire time.

Copyright reform advocates are and always were saying that the protection laws were doing more harm than good.

[neilv]

TorrentFreak is not a disinterested journalism site. Their sponsor ads are clearly targeted at pirates.

[ipaddr]

Can you name a non disinterested journalism site?

[Lucasoato]

We need a good balance between pirates and merchants.

If the former get too strong, it would stifle innovation and disincentive people from investing into improvements, technology, slowing the humanity’s progress towards a better world.

If the latter become too strong, (as it is right now) all those benefits risk to fall in too few hands, making this world even more unbalanced and unjust.

Let’s not give for granted the freedom that we have had until right now, it’s more at peril than we think.

[pbhjpbhj]

>We need a good balance between pirates and merchants.

I disagree.

We need sensible copyright terms of certainly no more than the patent terms (20 years) and probably a default of half-that.

We need to remove closed distribution if we want market forces to act -- by which I mean all distribution services can offer a work (maybe after 1 or 2 years of exclusive use) provided they pay the copyright holder the fee set.

No copyright unless a work can enter the public domain. So, creators need to deposit DRM free copies, or have no DRM. Sellers need to ensure games have server code available, or no copyright.

We don't need to support copyright infringement, we need to be serious about the public domain and ensure the system works for the demos.

These are of course my own views, independent of my employment.

[hakfoo]

I think we can go further. Copyright is a terrible hack. Creative works are not scarce, but they're subject to front-loaded costs. (Write the game/book/song once, and then every subsequent copy is essentially free).

Copyright said "let's force everyone to pretend this non-scarce item is scarce, so we have a way charge a non-zero price and recoup costs." It allowed us to continue to use market-economics tools, because we couldn't think of anything better. However, it also creates an ugly and immoral distortion of how we handle the precious commodity of knowledge, and ends up creating only a few winners at the expense of everyone else in society.

But it's by far not the only way to answer that question. Why not bail on using the market at all? Massively expand the public funding for creative works. Hire armies of software developers and artists to earn a decent wage creating, and we'd probably still spend less overall because we could eliminate the opportunity for a few short-tail bazillionaires and the parasitic industries parceling out "rights".

[cultureswitch]

Disconnecting the economic rent from the value of a piece of cultural to each individual is a horrid idea.

Culture, like everything else, is subject to the pareto principle. A handful of works are so much better than the rest that they capture almost all of the money that the public is willing to part with. This is true regardless of economic system.

[hakfoo]

I question the ability of the market to measure quality. Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality. Even though they made bazillions, will students in the high schools of 2523 be reading through scripts of Friends and Breaking Bad the way we slogged through King Lear and Othello?

What makes it to market is already a constrained selection. It has to make it through a bunch of commercial filters (investors and publishers who'd rather do a predictably bankable franchise product over a new whole-cloth one), and then you have the issue of only hearing from those who are financially and physically stable enough to create cultural works in the first place. How many potential writers can't start their novel because they're working three jobs, or hiding for their lives in Gaza?

Copyright itself also produces a huge filter by discouraging iterative creativity. It silences people whose talent is building on or expanding existing work. See the guy who is being ordered by the courts to destroy his LOTR derivative product. Perhaps there's a chance to make better Tolkein than Tolkein himself, but we won't know for another 50 years or so.

I'd rather we tell artists "go crazy, you're guaranteed 70k per year, whether you make the next Iron Man, or something so avant-garde only six people actually get it, and four of them are just claiming they do to fit in." We'll at least get more diverse products, and let history decide what's meritorious.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality.

Thanks for giving us your position; I think I'm generally in agreement with you.

Here though it's good to note that [at least] one type of historic importance develops over time.

Die Hard, to take an arbitrary example, might not have been an important film as far as its art or technical quality [I don't know, it's not important to my point] but its enduring nature and position as an icon -- as a sort of mainstream but somehow counter-cultural part of Christmas for those of us of a certain age and certain bent -- makes it important when otherwise it would not be. It's not intrinsic to the artwork but emerges out of the societal response to the work.

In the UK we've been paying for the BBC to make culturally responsive TV for decades, yet somehow it all got tied back up in copyright when really it should be publicly owned and free-libre to anyone who will pay the download costs [and, perhaps, has a "TV License"].

[trinsic2]

I agree. If the public domain was as important as copyright, the problem of piracy would largely go away. It's people, living in the midst of the public, that think they have a god given right to create works of art solely for profit. Art is meant to improve the public good. Making money from that work is only a byproduct of your contribution to society.

Since everything is ass backwards, its no wonder people pirate content.

[icehawk]

That doesn't follow, online copyright infringement didn't require anyone to write the DMCA in its current form.

[neilv]

Piracy empowered crappy corporations and politicians to do DMCA.

[kmeisthax]

No. Piracy always existed and the corporations didn't need DMCA 512 to sue people. In fact, before 512 you could sue platforms directly and get a huge judgement. 512 protects Google, not creators, plaintiffs, defendants, or copyright holders at large.

[cultureswitch]

We would be better off without copyright enforcement at all than whatever we have now.