The punishment for that is less quality work, or even nothing at all. Remember, in order to get the great production effects, action sequences, etc of a movie it costs millions. That is on top of what the artists think they are worth. A pirate will know the consequences of his actions because he may not get the great movie he wanted for free. Artists can hold pirates to account very powerfully like this.
If the pirate pledges, he can rest assured that he won't be ripped off himself (it will get to the point where studios will refund pledges if the movie gets cancelled halfway - studios take the fall in this way already) and he also will not be ripped off by a middleman, legitimate or not, who may profit from someone not acting on the behalf of the artist. Legal retailers, remember, do not necessarily participate in fair capitalism when they sell bulk DVDs at a profit - if you follow IP philosophy closely, this profit could be seen as a form of IP theft.
Lets actually take this much further: I can watch a legal copy of a DVD for free while following all the copyright laws - by borrowing from a friend, reselling through Ebay or watching it at a friend's house - I can free ride without any sense of accountability whatsoever.
Kickstarter, on the other hand, makes even THOSE kinds of unspoken free-riders accountable. Even the people who supposedly "contribute" to the artist by getting the DVDs second hand (they don't) will have to pitch in with the pledges in a much more direct way. That's the beauty of this. Copyright cannot do anything about these kinds of free-riders while crowdfunding can. So there's an additional advantage there.
It's an argument ad capitalism, isn't it? Well... if there is such a phrase.
I'm as much of a Leftist as most people when it comes to taxing the hell out of the 1% even if Kickstarter themselves fall into that category one day (and believe you me, they will), but the free-market is the only sane perspective we can have here. People have a right to spend their money on whatever they like.
The whole thing is probably a secret distaste of Kickstarter in general. People generally don't like change. Or anything anti-copyright.
By the way, you must always remember that corporations can themselves place Kickstarter bids. Even the ones engaged in piracy. All the way from Google to Megaupload: they'll all start placing refundable pledges of their own (remember, nobody has anything to lose). They'll eventually see that this is in their best interests in order to make a profit from advertising. The balance of power swings over to the artists.
Watch as more and more crowdfunding artists will put their work into the public domain after creation. Watch as more and more pirates are held accountable in ways that copyright could never begin to dream about.
With crowdfunding, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he has nothing to pirate. But with copyright, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he can get away with it.
Crowdfunding websites are the intellectual radicals here. They're not even aware of it themselves.
The arguments against Kickstarter have been laughably baseless. Remember how Amanda Palmer was attacked for a) promoting piracy of her works (which even copyright advocates have to say is within her rights to do so) and b)making too much money? I thought, "Well, there you have it. A system which can help people encourage piracy of their own works by essentially putting it in the public domain and still become filthy rich... and the copyright advocates just want to stick their fingers in their ears and yell 'I'm not listening!' Absolutely perfect."
The logical elegance of assurance contracts cannot be overstated here. Tickets, preordered content, crowdfunding, all of it has tons of evidence to back up a way of thinking that completely discredits copyright.
Paywalls do little to stop people from getting what they want without paying, are easy to walk around with the use of proxies, waste everybody's time and effort, and are fundamentally futile and self-ridiculing.
In fact, they are just about as useful as the U.S.'s Mexican border fence.
Copyright never ceases to be intellectually dishonest.
If this were crowdfunding, it'd be impossible for a label to oppress artists like this. The artists would have them by the balls.
Also, there would be no way for labels to cheat on royalties. The money would be there for all to see, and labels would have to pay their share: no excuses, no exceptions.
Assurance contracts intellectually trump everything here. Tickets, crowdfunding, all verifiable and backed up by evidence. With no human rights compromises.
If you think it is bad now, just imagine how worse it would have been if Saddam Hussein was still in power. Or his two sadistic sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein.
Always remember: Middle Eastern revolutions gained inspiration and ground on the days that Saddam Hussein was tried for war crimes on TV for all to see. The U.S. mass media decided to keep all of that unreported for so long.
Remember how lots of people laughed at the "domino theory" and democracy being spread across the region? Well what do you call the mass toppling of dictators and huge spread of Arab Spring movements? That's what we on the Left call "destabilisation". We don't say it like it's a bad thing.
Getting rid of Saddam, the 1984-esque totalitarian dictator, was a move that was finally on the right side of history.
Re: Worry about something in your supposed economics, Mike:
Maybe if I just SHOUT my words LIKE this, that WILL give THEM MORE rationality and JUSTIFICATION. CAN I be TAKEN MORE seriously NOW that I am screaming SOME OF my SELECTED words at YOU?!
See, look what you've done. My throat now hurts. I was having fun.
Every notice how religious loonies do the same thing on the internet? If they just capitalise "GOD" enough times that will somehow make it true?
Re: "one of the few actual victims" -- Right, if omit movie studios
I love how copyright believers "slant" the idea that copyright solves the free-rider problem and pretend that someone can't take from the artist without paying through means of borrowed/resold DVDs.
From what I recall in George Orwell's 1984, the proles did not have any telescreens in their homes because the Inner Party did not see the proles as a threat due to their naivety and lack of education.
I don't think Orwell could have predicted a capitalist society where everybody genuinely does have a telescreen of some sort even if they are not wired directly to central government servers - the modern day equivalent would be your laptop and webcam.
Instead of cameras all hooked up to a central government server, what we have is a mass web of cameras where everybody can potentially be their own Big Brother, and record anything on the street with their camera phones, which might become a massive viral YouTube hit.
This can be both good and bad. Both cyber utopianism and cyber dystopianism need to be criticised, but utopianism more so as it is more prevalent. This RSA Animate video does a good job:
What is particularly interesting is the way he points to how fascists can crowdsource protest videos in order to identify protesters and report them to their dictators. It is not always the case that the internet can be beneficial in movements like these: sometimes it can be the secret police's best weapon. In cases like these, you really do have your Big Brother situation.
Having said all this, it can be hard to see why CCTV cameras should be treated as the biggest privacy threat. Surely ALL cameras pose a risk of some sort, whether a close-up one on your phone that can capture faces perfectly, or a slow moving, blurry, low-frame rate camera on top of some obscure pole with a crap view of things. A policeman can either confiscate everybody's camera phone's hard drives just as much as they can take CCTV tapes, or just look at YouTube.
Google Glasses do not seem like such a big deal now, do they? At the end of the day, it is just another camera that is no more significant than hidden fiber cameras journalists hide in their ties. Whatever can be done on those glasses in terms of facial recognition, or video recording, can all be done on a regular phone anyway. And don't forget that we only have so much storage space to hold all the footage before a) we run out of storage or b) we have to be charged for the storage. I do not know how much longer YouTube can go on taking its (last I checked) 72 hours a second upload rate before it has to start charging or removing old videos.
It's probably more accurate to say that once any media, such as a photograph, audio recording or movie, captures a moment and it leaves your private sphere into the public sphere, it will probably hit the internet sometime soon and you will not be able to take it off.
We need to emphasise a culture that recognises the importance of private and public spheres. Every time we upload something to the internet, we must assume that it is going to stay there as long as the internet exists. And every time we take a photograph of something WITHOUT uploading, we must guard it within the realms of our own privacy on the assumption that once it leaves our hands, it will be on the internet as long as the internet exists.
I go through this mentality every time I even type a comment, now. You have to bear in mind that future employers can look up anything you've ever said on public internet forums with the right search techniques, as well as future spouses. If you've got yourself in a way-too-embarrassing situation on the street (you've tripped up hilariously), your first instinct will probably be to look around and make sure noone was filming, in case your moment of failure becomes a viral meme. Even anything you click may be picked up by a site for some kind of metric advertising purpose.
The disturbing thing is that a lot of people will protest heavily against secret malware that's made it onto their computers and watches everything they do on those computers. Especially if it is a corporation with advertising intents. But if it's subtle DRM that you aren't even aware of - not EA's DRM but the much more dangerous kind of DRM that doesn't make itself obvious - people are quite ready to throw up their arms and say that being spied on by this stuff is all justified in the name of copyright law, even although there is hardly any evidence that DRM works in the face of a determined pirate (and it just takes one - one pirate - to crack it, and wouldn't you know, once that cracked version goes on the internet it stays on the internet as long as it exists).
Steam fans don't seem to mind that Valve has a kill switch to all games they've bought from the store. If JManga decides to remove all user's content as a result of going bust (as some contemptible way of making people pay again to get their stolen stuff back), what is to stop Valve from going down this route too if they go bust?
People can very nastily fall into psychological traps that blur the lines between private and public when on the internet.
But of course, if you are in Hyundai's position, you're either being very silly or very clever.
In the recent Richard Prince ruling over fair use in appropriation art, the court used the standard of a “new expression, meaning, or message” for transformative works.
"New expression/meaning/message" - see, I can immediately see many things wrong with this. It depends on subjective interpretation, such as what expression we are even talking about, let alone if it is "new". I can walk up to any painting and pull out 100 different interpretations of it.
I become very suspicious in moments like these, because I cannot imagine anybody competent enough to make such a decision.
A transformative work is when a derivative artist makes a creative work in a different medium from the original, and is non-commercial (I think). So it would be a sketch of a movie scene, for example, but not a movie of a movie.
But it's rather stupid: all the original author has to do in order to prevent people showing off transformative works is make his OWN transformative works before they do. So the original author himself makes a sketch of a scene from a movie, and now THAT counts as belonging to the original IP meaning the derivative artist's services are no longer considered transformative (the derivative artist's sketch would not come from a movie scene, but from another original sketch from the original artist).
"Here's a best practice: do your own work. If you're making music, record the tracks yourself. If you're writing a news article, actually do some reporting. Don't clip a huge blockquote and write a two sentence introduction."
Derivative artists have rights to their fruits of labour. John Locke would have absolutely detested this line of thinking.
" If you're running a blog and selling ads, don't use "non-commercial" CC photos. Heck, actually pay a photographer or license stock photos. They're not very expensive."
The whole point about CC is that the author has given permission. Even copyright advocates would call you out on that.
" In other words, use fair use for what it's designed to do: allow people to reuse snippets to provide context. It's not a way to take from others."
Free speech and rights for derivative artists, actually. I can provide context for what I am talking about without needing to take snippets, but you don't hear me saying there should be no Fair Use on that basis. Because that would be stupid.
"But somehow I think all of the copryight deniers around here will be arguing against even these "best practices." They'll be saying that a musician has some imaginary "right" to make an album without picking up an instrument simply by "remixing" someone else's work. They'll say that a blogger has some ephemeral "right" to run a news service without paying reporters or photographers."
If you've really got the balls to see this through, then call for the shutting down of deviantArt and the criminalisation of fan art/fan fiction. I'd admire you for being consistent.
"Horse manure. Copyright is the union card for artists. Quit denying it."
An assurance contract is the union card, actually. Crowdfunding/ticket admission is the ultimate Occam's Razor explanation. Both original and derivative artists have their rights protected.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
Re: Re: Re:
If the pirate pledges, he can rest assured that he won't be ripped off himself (it will get to the point where studios will refund pledges if the movie gets cancelled halfway - studios take the fall in this way already) and he also will not be ripped off by a middleman, legitimate or not, who may profit from someone not acting on the behalf of the artist. Legal retailers, remember, do not necessarily participate in fair capitalism when they sell bulk DVDs at a profit - if you follow IP philosophy closely, this profit could be seen as a form of IP theft.
Lets actually take this much further: I can watch a legal copy of a DVD for free while following all the copyright laws - by borrowing from a friend, reselling through Ebay or watching it at a friend's house - I can free ride without any sense of accountability whatsoever.
Kickstarter, on the other hand, makes even THOSE kinds of unspoken free-riders accountable. Even the people who supposedly "contribute" to the artist by getting the DVDs second hand (they don't) will have to pitch in with the pledges in a much more direct way. That's the beauty of this. Copyright cannot do anything about these kinds of free-riders while crowdfunding can. So there's an additional advantage there.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
Re: Interesting
I'm as much of a Leftist as most people when it comes to taxing the hell out of the 1% even if Kickstarter themselves fall into that category one day (and believe you me, they will), but the free-market is the only sane perspective we can have here. People have a right to spend their money on whatever they like.
The whole thing is probably a secret distaste of Kickstarter in general. People generally don't like change. Or anything anti-copyright.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
Re:
Watch as more and more crowdfunding artists will put their work into the public domain after creation. Watch as more and more pirates are held accountable in ways that copyright could never begin to dream about.
With crowdfunding, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he has nothing to pirate. But with copyright, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he can get away with it.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
The arguments against Kickstarter have been laughably baseless. Remember how Amanda Palmer was attacked for a) promoting piracy of her works (which even copyright advocates have to say is within her rights to do so) and b)making too much money? I thought, "Well, there you have it. A system which can help people encourage piracy of their own works by essentially putting it in the public domain and still become filthy rich... and the copyright advocates just want to stick their fingers in their ears and yell 'I'm not listening!' Absolutely perfect."
The logical elegance of assurance contracts cannot be overstated here. Tickets, preordered content, crowdfunding, all of it has tons of evidence to back up a way of thinking that completely discredits copyright.
On the post: Silliest Argument Ever: Just Because A YouTube Paywall Launches It Means More Money Is Made
In fact, they are just about as useful as the U.S.'s Mexican border fence.
On the post: Streetlight Manifesto Can't Fulfill Pre-Orders Because Label Refuses To Give Them Their Own Records
Copyright never ceases to be intellectually dishonest.
Also, there would be no way for labels to cheat on royalties. The money would be there for all to see, and labels would have to pay their share: no excuses, no exceptions.
Assurance contracts intellectually trump everything here. Tickets, crowdfunding, all verifiable and backed up by evidence. With no human rights compromises.
On the post: Iraqi Government Shutters Television Stations It Doesn't Like
Progress will be made... now that it can.
Always remember: Middle Eastern revolutions gained inspiration and ground on the days that Saddam Hussein was tried for war crimes on TV for all to see. The U.S. mass media decided to keep all of that unreported for so long.
Remember how lots of people laughed at the "domino theory" and democracy being spread across the region? Well what do you call the mass toppling of dictators and huge spread of Arab Spring movements? That's what we on the Left call "destabilisation". We don't say it like it's a bad thing.
Getting rid of Saddam, the 1984-esque totalitarian dictator, was a move that was finally on the right side of history.
On the post: EFF Gives Prince A 'Lifetime Aggrievement Award' For DMCA Takedown Abuse
Re: Worry about something in your supposed economics, Mike:
See, look what you've done. My throat now hurts. I was having fun.
Every notice how religious loonies do the same thing on the internet? If they just capitalise "GOD" enough times that will somehow make it true?
On the post: John Steele, Silent In Court, Keeps Talking To The Press; Says New Lawsuits Are Being Filed
On the post: Royalty Collection Agency SABAM Sues Belgian ISPs In Pursuit Of Its Fantasy 'Piracy License'
On the post: Author Of To Kill A Mockingbird Sues Agent For Swiping Her Copyright
Re: "one of the few actual victims" -- Right, if omit movie studios
On the post: Author Of To Kill A Mockingbird Sues Agent For Swiping Her Copyright
On the post: The Fight Over DRM In HTML5 Should Represent The Last Stand For DRM
Re:
On the post: Moral Panic Over Google Glass: White House Petition Asks To Ban Them To Prevent 'Indecent' Public Surveillance
I don't think Orwell could have predicted a capitalist society where everybody genuinely does have a telescreen of some sort even if they are not wired directly to central government servers - the modern day equivalent would be your laptop and webcam.
Instead of cameras all hooked up to a central government server, what we have is a mass web of cameras where everybody can potentially be their own Big Brother, and record anything on the street with their camera phones, which might become a massive viral YouTube hit.
This can be both good and bad. Both cyber utopianism and cyber dystopianism need to be criticised, but utopianism more so as it is more prevalent. This RSA Animate video does a good job:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU
What is particularly interesting is the way he points to how fascists can crowdsource protest videos in order to identify protesters and report them to their dictators. It is not always the case that the internet can be beneficial in movements like these: sometimes it can be the secret police's best weapon. In cases like these, you really do have your Big Brother situation.
Having said all this, it can be hard to see why CCTV cameras should be treated as the biggest privacy threat. Surely ALL cameras pose a risk of some sort, whether a close-up one on your phone that can capture faces perfectly, or a slow moving, blurry, low-frame rate camera on top of some obscure pole with a crap view of things. A policeman can either confiscate everybody's camera phone's hard drives just as much as they can take CCTV tapes, or just look at YouTube.
Google Glasses do not seem like such a big deal now, do they? At the end of the day, it is just another camera that is no more significant than hidden fiber cameras journalists hide in their ties. Whatever can be done on those glasses in terms of facial recognition, or video recording, can all be done on a regular phone anyway. And don't forget that we only have so much storage space to hold all the footage before a) we run out of storage or b) we have to be charged for the storage. I do not know how much longer YouTube can go on taking its (last I checked) 72 hours a second upload rate before it has to start charging or removing old videos.
On the post: Hyundai Tries, And Fails, To Make Its Awful Suicide Ad Disappear From The Internet
We need to emphasise a culture that recognises the importance of private and public spheres. Every time we upload something to the internet, we must assume that it is going to stay there as long as the internet exists. And every time we take a photograph of something WITHOUT uploading, we must guard it within the realms of our own privacy on the assumption that once it leaves our hands, it will be on the internet as long as the internet exists.
I go through this mentality every time I even type a comment, now. You have to bear in mind that future employers can look up anything you've ever said on public internet forums with the right search techniques, as well as future spouses. If you've got yourself in a way-too-embarrassing situation on the street (you've tripped up hilariously), your first instinct will probably be to look around and make sure noone was filming, in case your moment of failure becomes a viral meme. Even anything you click may be picked up by a site for some kind of metric advertising purpose.
The disturbing thing is that a lot of people will protest heavily against secret malware that's made it onto their computers and watches everything they do on those computers. Especially if it is a corporation with advertising intents. But if it's subtle DRM that you aren't even aware of - not EA's DRM but the much more dangerous kind of DRM that doesn't make itself obvious - people are quite ready to throw up their arms and say that being spied on by this stuff is all justified in the name of copyright law, even although there is hardly any evidence that DRM works in the face of a determined pirate (and it just takes one - one pirate - to crack it, and wouldn't you know, once that cracked version goes on the internet it stays on the internet as long as it exists).
Steam fans don't seem to mind that Valve has a kill switch to all games they've bought from the store. If JManga decides to remove all user's content as a result of going bust (as some contemptible way of making people pay again to get their stolen stuff back), what is to stop Valve from going down this route too if they go bust?
People can very nastily fall into psychological traps that blur the lines between private and public when on the internet.
But of course, if you are in Hyundai's position, you're either being very silly or very clever.
On the post: Fair Use Protects Some Uses, But It Is Still Way Too Weak To Be Effective For Many
Re: Re: Question About "Transformative" Uses
"New expression/meaning/message" - see, I can immediately see many things wrong with this. It depends on subjective interpretation, such as what expression we are even talking about, let alone if it is "new". I can walk up to any painting and pull out 100 different interpretations of it.
I become very suspicious in moments like these, because I cannot imagine anybody competent enough to make such a decision.
On the post: Fair Use Protects Some Uses, But It Is Still Way Too Weak To Be Effective For Many
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Question About "Transformative" Uses
But it should be easy for the original artist just to realise the IP under all possible mediums all in one go to prevent this from happening.
On the post: Fair Use Protects Some Uses, But It Is Still Way Too Weak To Be Effective For Many
Re: Re: Re: Question About "Transformative" Uses
On the post: Fair Use Protects Some Uses, But It Is Still Way Too Weak To Be Effective For Many
Re: Question About "Transformative" Uses
But it's rather stupid: all the original author has to do in order to prevent people showing off transformative works is make his OWN transformative works before they do. So the original author himself makes a sketch of a scene from a movie, and now THAT counts as belonging to the original IP meaning the derivative artist's services are no longer considered transformative (the derivative artist's sketch would not come from a movie scene, but from another original sketch from the original artist).
On the post: Fair Use Protects Some Uses, But It Is Still Way Too Weak To Be Effective For Many
Re: "Best Practices"?
Derivative artists have rights to their fruits of labour. John Locke would have absolutely detested this line of thinking.
" If you're running a blog and selling ads, don't use "non-commercial" CC photos. Heck, actually pay a photographer or license stock photos. They're not very expensive."
The whole point about CC is that the author has given permission. Even copyright advocates would call you out on that.
" In other words, use fair use for what it's designed to do: allow people to reuse snippets to provide context. It's not a way to take from others."
Free speech and rights for derivative artists, actually. I can provide context for what I am talking about without needing to take snippets, but you don't hear me saying there should be no Fair Use on that basis. Because that would be stupid.
"But somehow I think all of the copryight deniers around here will be arguing against even these "best practices." They'll be saying that a musician has some imaginary "right" to make an album without picking up an instrument simply by "remixing" someone else's work. They'll say that a blogger has some ephemeral "right" to run a news service without paying reporters or photographers."
If you've really got the balls to see this through, then call for the shutting down of deviantArt and the criminalisation of fan art/fan fiction. I'd admire you for being consistent.
"Horse manure. Copyright is the union card for artists. Quit denying it."
An assurance contract is the union card, actually. Crowdfunding/ticket admission is the ultimate Occam's Razor explanation. Both original and derivative artists have their rights protected.