[madao]

Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something, someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.

That being said with any form of piracy it is in effect stealing. If one were to go down to the local store and steal a product from the shelves and make a run for the doors, you will also be caught, brought up to the police, charged and taken before the courts.

Now is the methods being used by the record companies correct? probably not. But do they have a right to try and protect their profits from looters and moochers of the world? they sure do.

I think digital media is the way of the future, especially being able to access it from anywhere in the world with little or no effort.

I just think that piracy in this sense has been taken for granted for much to long and we should work towards naming it as it should be named and stop getting up and arms about it as much as we do and just pay for what we use instead of running off to the local torrent site and downloading the shit out of it.

[Osiris]

The problem is this common analogy is completely off base. When you steal from a store, that store had purchased a physical product from a wholesaler. This is know as the "cost of goods sold." The store maintains an inventory of product for which they have already paid a significant sum of money in order to place it on the shelves.

When you steal from the store you remove an item from their inventory which they cannot sell. The cost of that item that was already paid now has to be covered by profits made up from selling other items in the inventory, thus increasing (albeit very little) the price of the rest of the inventory.

In other words, the physical good is moved from one place to another, depriving the original owner of its value.

File sharing, on the other hand, has no marginal cost to each "copy" of a file. If I write a song or software and put it on the internet, it costs me nothing if 1 or one million people share the file (assuming it's not my bandwidth to pay for). Also, if one user downloads my file it does not disappear or transfer from me to them. I do not have to manufacture another item. File sharing is copying. Stealing is transfer of ownership.

So, you cannot directly compare file sharing, which has no marginal cost, to physical items that have a marginal cost of production. What owners of copyrighted works are trying to recover are their fixed costs in producing the work.

[wazoox]

This old dead horse doesn't need any more beating, but apparently the obvious has to be stated once again:

when you copy a digital "good" you don't deprive its owner from it. Therefore this is NOT stealing in any way. Not even remotely akin to stealing.

Let's get it straight a last time (I hope): if you have an apple and I take it, you haven't got it anymore. Digital goods are INFORMATION. When you give me an information YOU STILL F*CKING HAVE IT. By your twisted way of thinking, people reading headlines in papers at the store are burglars, and so are people reading the time on your watch without asking you first. This cannot be the case. This shouldn't be the case. This won't be the case.

[madao]

Your twisting my words now, people pay for headlines with advertising and what not, we are talking about music or perhaps even movies, these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money, not for your enjoyment or for your friends enjoyment, them make it and package it.

Then someone comes downs rightfully buys it and enjoys the fruits of others labours.

What is not right is to reward artists by telling them that their hard work is just information free to be handed out to everyone, seriously call it what you want, you are stealing from these people. They don’t want you to give it to your friends or random people off the internet, they want you to pay for it.

If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.

[wazoox]

> these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money

Just to make it clear: I've been a professional musician, a composer an arranger, and I've played with Touré Kunda and recorded with Deep Forest. I've also been a graphic artist and built the official TV CGs effects for World Cup 1998. I pretend to know quite a bit about why people (including myself) create music or art, and I can affirm you that even the worst commercial, tasteless eurodance artist doesn't do it for the money first. They want to perform their art first, then seek a way to get money while doing it.

Selling your art can take numerous forms. For musicians, most of the time the better part of their revenue comes from concerts and not recorded music (usually at best they get a few percents of a CD price anyway).

> you are stealing from these people.

I've only extremely rarely downloaded any media from the net, and only things unavailable by other ways. I'm standing on principles and not looking for excuses.

> If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.

Amusingly enough, that's exactly what I'm doing.

[Gormo]

> these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money

So? Disney produced "John Carter" expressly for money. Microsoft designed the Zune expressly for money. MySpace built their social networking platform expressly for money. Were their rights violated because these products were failures?

No one is guaranteed a positive return on their speculative ventures. People aren't entitled to be rewarded solely for effort, and they don't have the right to attempt to re-engineer other people's affairs in order to secure a higher payoff on their activities.

[JC001]

The argument isn't over whether it's a physical token that won't be available for sale. Even without a physical token it's still stealing.

If everyone were to just take digital content without paying for it, would this still be ok?

If so, why would anyone produce the digital content knowing they won't receive compensation?

And how does this apply to other non-digital marketplaces:

If you went to a dentist to have your teeth cleaned, would it be ok to never pay the dentist? After all, the dentist is still able to clean other teeth?

If you had your car towed to a mechanic, does the tow truck driver have to be paid?

[danenania]

"If so, why would anyone produce the digital content knowing they won't receive compensation?"

Why should we restrict freedom of information and create a huge Orwellian enforcement bureaucracy just to make it easier for a small segment of society to make money off digital content? If your business model requires forcibly prohibiting people to share strings of 1s and 0s to be successful, then find a better business model. If you can't, that's your problem.

I agree that content creators deserve respect and attribution, but the freedom to share information is much more important as a social principle.

[JC001]

Are we talking about "freedom of information" or are we talking about music, movies, tv shows, software and other content that was created for the sole purpose of economic income?

"Information" to me sounds like you're talking about something more fundamental, I'm just not sure what. But sharing copyrighted material should by no means be considered something that is a social principle.

[danenania]

"But sharing copyrighted material should by no means be considered something that is a social principle."

It is, in fact. My friends don't have to pay royalties to content creators when they look at paintings I have hanging up in my house, watch a movie I rented, or borrow a book from me. This isn't because we don't respect copyright as a society, but because we recognize that sharing is a natural human activity, and the measures required to enforce the prevention of such behavior would create a society without freedom or privacy that no one wants to live in.

For similar reasons, what I choose to upload and download on a p2p network is no one's business but mine and the peer I've connected to. They are in effect private conversations, and any legal system that requires monitoring of these private conversations will, carried to its logical conclusion, eliminate all privacy and freedom in digital life, since any single packet on the network, whether it's for email, web traffic, or any other use, could conceivably contain copyrighted bit sequences and therefore be marked for inspection. Similarly, every file on our computers would obviously need to be scanned at borders and other checkpoints to be sure no one had infringing bit sequences on their systems.

Look, there have been plenty of examples that show that a significant percentage of people are willing to pay for digital content even when they could otherwise obtain it freely through file sharing, whether out of respect content creators, or for the sake of quality and convenience. So this isn't a question of whether or not copyrighted digital content can survive--it's been well proven that it can survive and thrive. No, the question is whether we should allow a few entrenched stakeholders to trample our civil rights in order to milk a bit of extra revenue out of the system without having to innovate in response to new cultural norms.

[res0nat0r]

Your civil rights aren't being trampled because it is illegal to download or upload and post online a 1080p rip of the latest Hollywood blockbuster for thousands to download easily.

[jdotjdot]

There are some major flaws in your argument here. First, remember that someone creating content of any kind, digital or not, is not automatically entitles to compensation. Even in the days of CDs, someone had to physically buy the discs for them to make money--and if the music sucked, they didn't. There are plenty of reasons why someone would create content without expecting to be directly paid for it: reputation, enjoyment, contributing to the sum of human knowledge and the human experience. Why do scientists do research? Yes, they are salaried, but they are not getting paid for their "content" specifically; their research is released into the world for free (hidden only behind journal pay walls, a separate issue).

As for your comment on non digital domains, it suffers from the same flaw as previous arguments above. When you get your teeth cleaned or your car towed, it is NOT true that the dentist for example could still clean other teeth. He can in the future, but during the time he cleaned your teeth, he could have been cleaning someonje else's teeth but wasn't because he was cleaning yours. There is an opportunity cost there. With digital files, there is no such cost. It makes no difference whatsoever to a file or its creator whether it is shared one time or a thousand, since the creator isn't doing anything differently nor investing incremental time or money for each additional share.

[madao]

I love how I am getting down voted because people don't believe in paying for what is due, personally down vote away, I consider it a compliment.

[bluedanieru]

You're getting downvoted for willfully conflating two different terms in a game of semantics in order to muddy the waters in support of your argument, you arrogant little shit.

[Gormo]

>Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something,

That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it.

Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely.

> someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it.

But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind.

What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours.

Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies.

Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.

[JoeAltmaier]

And that's the mental gymnastic that lets people steal all sorts of intellectual property - they rationalize it, pretend it isn't somebody's property and livelihood, and take it mostly because they just want it and its hard to secure so it ok, right?

If I'm not willing to pay him, then he's not owed anything. Hey! I'm not willing to pay for lots of things; now I can just take them. Thanks, Gormo! I'm free of social responsibility!

[Gormo]

The only mental gymnastic present here is your repeated attempt to create some kind of equivalence between intangible concepts and physical objects by using words like "property" and "stealing". In reality, the concept of property only has meaning with respect to rival goods, and it's impossible to "steal" conceptual content from people without performing lobotomies on them.

Your property rights extend to allowing you to assert exclusive physical ownership over the items that you have created or acquired through voluntary trade. Note that the concept of voluntary trade implies that making a living by taking advantage of speculative commercial opportunities is necessarily excluded from the scope of your rights: your ability to make a profit through trade is definitionally contingent on other people's willingness to do business with you. The commercial viability of your work is necessarily other people's "property".

When the work you're doing produces physical goods that you intend for sale, the distinction between your property rights in the goods themselves and your access to the commercial opportunities present for selling those goods may be blurred, since both are invoked via the physical object itself. But the distinction is still present: no one is obligated to purchase your widgets, but neither may anyone deprive you of those widgets without your consent.

But in the realm of pure ideas, which are intangible and non-rival, the distinction is much clearer: it's physically impossible for someone to steal your ideas. The best they can do is make their own separate copies of those ideas; they can't deprive you the product of your work itself. By making their own copies, all they're depriving you of is the opportunity to sell the idea to them. But, as we saw above, that opportunity was never yours in the first place; it was always contingent on their consent rather than yours.

Attempting to use positive law to create artificial "property rights" in purely conceptual "goods" is akin to a farmer lobbying for laws which punish people for keeping their own vegetable gardens. You're attempting to re-engineer the circumstances of other people's lives in order to force them to be your customers. The reality is that "intellectual property" policies violates other people's real rights in order to mitigate the risks of speculators, so I think it's safe to say that by advocating such a policy, you've already abandoned any pretense of "social responsibility".