Well, sure, but "theft" is an easy shorthand for "taking that for which you did not pay" and therefore the usage works well (for people who take to one side of the argument).Taking something you didn't pay for is theft. Okay? Can we move on now? Or does it make all the piraters too uncomfortable to use accurate words to describe their actions?
If you build me a website and I refuse to pay you but use the site files anyway, have I stolen from you?No, you have violated a contract with me. Unless of course you didn't have a contract with me, in which case I was dumb and built a web site for you, just hoping you would pay me for it after I gave you those things.
interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ... 'an infringer of the copyright.' ...That's not impenetrable. It's pretty easy.
The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
—Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207, pp. 217–218
How so? How is my work less valuable than yours? Or a plumber's? Or a lawyer's? Or a teacher's? In fact, how is that, according to you, my work has no monetary value at all?It's certainly no less valuable!
An important difference with the Open Source Software model is that developers are not making work for a for-profit corporation, so they know that it will not be used to earn someone else millions of dollars with none coming their way.Quite the opposite, actually: one of the primary drivers for the growth of Open Source software these days is the fact that companies don't have to pay millions of dollars in licensing fees to use, or even resell OSS in many cases. It's a double-edged sword.
That you lot get all bent out of shape about it is telling; using stark words makes it so much harder to rationalize away the theft.That you don't understand the difference between 'distribution monopoly' and 'physical possession' is also telling. Perhaps we could call the RIAA terrorists, because they instill terror via their lawsuits? Language has meaning, and the fact that using it incorrectly feels better to you does not change that fact.
That you equate copyright with RIAA is even more telling.I did no such thing, and either you're spleen-venting without bothering to read what I say or you're deliberately misrepresenting it to score cheap points. Step back, and read carefully over the things that have been said here over the last couple of days. You'll find that the active participants in the conversation are not in fact apologists for the rape and pillage of our civilization.
Free stolen shit for everyone! It's not like artists need to eat or have the time to create!The current system we use to compensate certain types of content creators is a house of cards. We've spent a couple of technology generations convincing artists that "creation time" is a loss-leader, and that they can only recoup their costs by licensing their work to middle-men who then sell the service of duplication and distribution. That approach was a very interesting development, and it worked well for a while, but it relied on the difficulty of large scale duplication and distribution. That difficulty has vanished, for better or worse, and the middlemen who staked out that part of the process ignored it until it was too late.
Funny, I thought the problem was people taking shit that wasn't theirs and not paying for it. Boy, you showed me! If I just use a different and less accurate word, the whole world will change!Your anger does not make your statements accurate. It doesn't make your inaccuracy helpful, either, for those of us who are interested in figuring out how to survive as content creators in a post-marginal-cost world.
This is where intellectual property starts feeling a bit like gambling. No one expects plumbers to work without pay, but plumbers also don't expect to hit the jackpot if they fix one toilet really, really well.I think that might be part of it; I remember the shocking moment when I realized that most novels never netted their authors more than a couple thousand dollars, and that even very successful ones would only really give the author the equivalent of a year's living wage. Friends of mine have been in and out of various bands for the past fifteen years, and I've watched them go through the realization process as well: they've launched side businesses, started doing freelance studio work, held down second jobs, etc. to keep things going. This isn't really
Yes, and I think that may be an unspoken reason so many successful artists just don't want to address these concerns. It may very well remove the possibility of exponential wealth generated by one good creation.
More generally, I think that the phrase "information wants to be free," while rather annoyingly used is basically correct, aside from the anthropomorphizing of information.It's also worth remembering that the original formulation of that quote was more complex: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
The concept of state support of creative work is anathema to most Americans, so I worry that we have before us a period of time when it is not possible any longer to be a professional creative worker and we will simply have shitty creative work until we make it an important value again.It's funny that you should mention that -- I was just thinking about programs like the NEA and other large-scale patronage systems. They're far from perfect but they have always been an attempt to get art that would not otherwise be "Commerce-Friendly" funded.
For myself, as an optimist I agree with what Trochanter said:Absolutely. I'm fascinated by Trochanter's comments above about the difficulty of getting distribution -- any distribution -- outside of labels a few decades ago. Print publishing is in a similar spot these days. Thirty years ago if you didn't get a publishing contract you either sucked it up and went back to your day job, or you invested thousands up front with a "vanity press" and sold books out of your trunk. Today print on demand, online serialization, and so on are all opening up doors -- hell, cutting doors into the wall.
It seems to me that this brave new world presents a world of opportunities, but that it will probably remain hard to be an aspiring artist.
I also strongly believe that those rights should not be transferable. I don't mind paying an artist for his work, but when a corporation takes ownership of a work, and is not the creator, then all bets are off.Sure, but that's also an artifact of the compensation mechanisms that we've been talking about. Corporations are good at supply chains, not so good at creation. Artists do the 'R&D' of developing new creative works, then license them (or sell them completely) to the corporations, who can turn those works into money via duplication monopoly.
As I implied earlier, I think copyright length is utterly out of whack in this country. I think 20 or 30 years would be quite sufficient to allow the author to make a reasonable return if that is their desire, yet not so long as to make it impossible to build on those works.Sure, but that's separate from the underlying casual infringement issues. Kids aren't generally digging around looking for Torrents of silent movies and Citizen Kane; new releases and current material is the vast majority of illegally distributed content.
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posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 1:30 PM on July 1, 2010