It is COPYRIGHT that prevents people from getting their due rewards.
I resent your implication that the copyright infringers who upload such great art to deviantArt have to surrender their rights in the name of "protecting fruits of labour". Do you not know the definition of doublethink?
Forget copyright, push forward with assurance contracts, and stop being such a Luddite.
Everyone knows that implementing the six-strikes policy on citizens is the best way of preventing them from ever getting their hands on unauthorised material.
I mean for goodness sake. Does NOBODY know that installing DRM on everything is a proven method of stopping traitors, in this case NSA staff, from engaging in any kind of spying? Now do not get me wrong. It is not like you need to do tons of cross-referencing after you have built a giant database of copyrighted data or anything.
That would be silly. INSTEAD, you need to wait until a website like MegaUpload builds it up for you and steal that. It saves you a lot of legal hassle.
Just look at how well Xbox One is doing. All this media coverage, all this hate, and still NOBODY has been able to pirate a game yet! THAT is DRM in action, folks! Oh, I also heard that Microsoft have installed software on their Kinect systems to automatically blur out any other monitor in the room in case it is playing copyrighted material. See? Even MICROSOFT will not take the opportunity to pirate! That is how serious they are! The system can work! So take THAT, Gmail! Attachments promote piracy - never forget.
So there you go. I am now going to read Dragonball Z on my lovely JManga app. I just bought the whole series a few days ago for just £100! Fucking bargain! This app brings my childhood back to life. Almost as if the Dragonballs wished it back, eh? Aww... last episode was SO funny. Dendee had made the wish to transport everyone on the planet Namek to the planet Earth except for Goku and Frieza, and as everyone on Namek is teleporting, Vegeta who had just been brought back to life flies over to a startled Frieza who cannot believe Vegeta is alive. "You must be a ghost!", claims Frieza. And Vegeta replies,
"Can a ghost do THIS, FRIEZA?!"
But before he can charge his energy ball to attack Frieza, he JUST TELEPORTS AND DISAPPEARS INTO THIN AIR! LOL!
Tell that to the Soviet dissidents of the 20th century who were forced to pirate the book in order to evade the secret police.
And the Iranians now who are forced to pirate copies of Animal Farm.
Not to mention a lot of the Chinese who need to smuggle goods underground in order to a) avoid the eyes of the secret police and b) get by the government's trade restrictions that are deliberately designed to take advantage of copyright law's existence.
I keep saying - to attack the Chinese government's cheating of free trade through monopoly of piracy, you need to get rid of the monopoly system that is causing it, which is copyright law.
When the government starts using DRM to gather this data, you will probably come up with the most ridiculous amateur-psychoanalysis ever:
"Government tendencies to overreach their powers by using DRM through corporation backdoors, are NOT in fact due to a long history of states trying to exert their powers using whatever means necessary... but are instead down to, wait for it, pirates. Pirates who DARE to demonstrate that DRM is a utopian fantasy. Aren't I a genius?"
You should surely see how I, as a materialist, am perfectly entitled to treat this view in the same way I treat the Creationist view of the world?
There is also the "anti-propaganda's propaganda" effect.
"Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Most of the rational people making the case for taking out Saddam knew there was no WMD at the time, but that was not the end of the story. He was a genocidal, totalitarian, Big Brother - the sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands and we couldn't lift the sanctions/no-fly-zones in case he tried to kill the Kurds again or try to get Iran/Kuwait again. There was very little alternative from historical experience. If he didn't implode the country, Uday and Qusay certainly would have. If it were anyone else - the killers of Rwanda, Darfur, Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Burmese generals, Assad in Syria, the military of North Korea or fucking Joseph Kony - our need to take them out would be indisputable." "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD"
Rationality means neither having blind faith in leaders NOR doing the exact opposite of what your leaders say. It means looking at evidence, argument, being dialectical, avoiding cliche, not being a megaphone for anybody, coming up with your own unique rhetoric, being willing to stand in front of millions of people and tell them they've all bought into an ad populum fallacy without blinking, and this is most important of all: being willing to self-scrutinise and not being afraid to change your mind about something even after being incredibly committed to the other side. All of this. The only way one can claim to be rational with any credibility at all is if one accepts how fallible and prone to bias one is.
I think there are genuine threats that can be born out of the internet. I'm queasy about the 2nd amendment but I cannot help paraphrase the NRA's mantra and substitute one key word to demonstrate what I mean: "the internet doesn't free people, people free people."
It disturbs me when the Chinese government, for example, sets up fake opposition blog websites in order to lure dissenters and snares them unexpectedly when the time is right. It disturbs me when Islamic fascists will crowdsource protest videos in order to identify the protesters and murder them the next time they step outside their houses. It disturbs me when everything you potentially send on the internet cannot be undone since it is a huge recording machine, and future employers can find it easier than ever to hold one embarrassing moment against you at every turn. It disturbs me how, as someone who believes in separation of powers, power has accumulated very centrally in terms of cloud computing (personal data being stolen in one swoop in the Megaupload raid - because apparently the actions of a few people were excuse enough to shut down a whole company), Google being effectively the centre of the internet, and ISPs having too many bottle necks of the economy due to globalisation effects. It disturbs me how witch-hunt and mob mentalities can spring up easier than before, whether it is using Blackberries to start riots in England, falsely naming names in sex-predator hysteria, or Reddit turning vigilante over an innocent person. It disturbs me how conservative many media organisations are being about the utopian fantasy that is copyright law, and how they keep pushing forward anti-piracy laws with all kinds of slippery slopes while hiding behind copyright as a veto, against seemingly no real opposition in Parliaments.
When it comes to that last point, I hope the irony isn't lost on everyone. As long as you are willing to stand up for intellectual honesty when it comes to, say, copyright being extended infinitely and on no basis, you end up realising that the "cyber" war was declared on YOU, and not the other way around.
However - the arguments about liberty, privacy, and freedom remain the same. The internet has done little to change them. Some change, yes, but not much. The metaphor I use to describe the internet's role in politics and a lot of other things is that it is a "catalyst" - it doesn't change the chemical reaction, but it speeds it up and gives it more life. This is true for the good and the bad.
"But the only great principle they're defending is that they're too cheap and lazy to do their own work."
The principle is that derivative artists have rights to their fruits of labour.
Telling different versions of Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Lion King IS "doing your own work". And copyright deprives artists of the right to do that.
What do you think websites like deviantArt and fanfiction.net have been doing for so long? Unless you want to really be consistent and say that these websites should be shut down, you're going to have to step back and see how copyright is AGAINST the principles of John Locke, not for them.
Crowdfunding, whether its through the many tried and tested examples of collecting tickets for gigs, or through Kickstarter, or pre-ordered copies of DVDs, is superior to copyright in every way because both original and derivative artists have their fruits of labour protected. It makes copyright discreditable from every angle.
You are not entitled to say how you are best defending the "rights of artists". So many markets have been wiped out as a result of the communist-tendencies of copyright and the life, liberty and property has been sucked out of derivative artists for too long. Crowdfunding gives us no excuse for it.
There. And I didn't have to mention how you've exculpated the accountability of corporations for what they do through using pirates as scapegoats. "Since the pirates are running riot, why should be do anything about privacy invasions?" I think there are even many principled copyright maximalists who could call you out for this nonsense. It is a matter of principle. The Patriot Act is to be opposed unequivocally, and I say this as somebody who supports the fight against Islamic fascism. It's the same thing.
What he means is "pirated copies of 1984 and Animal Farm circulating under the Soviet Union's radar" helped to win the cold war. The Soviets would have used any excuse to stop material like that from spreading. And that would have included copyright.
Always remember, every time a government censors an opinion they are in effect making an "intellectual property" claim on that opinion. You cannot say that because that idea belongs to us and noone else. Only we get to decide if that should be said. You must first ask us for permission. It is the same idea.
The Chinese population are highly lacking in internet, and when they DO have internet it is under high surveillance and restrictions. ITunes is heavily blocked. Indeed, it is hard to access any site from outside China while within China because it is so bad. So yeah, think SOPA but a hundred times worse. And what is the world piracy rate of the country? 80% That is what happens WITHOUT BitTorrent. The copyright advocates are deluding themselves when they say copyright needs "more protection". It's a blatant utopian delusion.
Nowadays, we can only pass around pirated copies of Animal Farm within Iran. Even Christopher Hitchens played a part in distributing the pirated copies when he visited the country in secret. He said of the Iranian mullahs (paraphrasing) "I love how they keep trying to show footage of themselves smashing the satellite dishes in order to prove a point. They aren't fooling anyone. It'll never work. Most Iranians know how to make international phone calls. Many server work-arounds are made to counter every move these thugs make. The more attempts at oppression, the more humourous it gets. We're going to see great things from Iran."
But of course, all of this has to be stopped in the name of a utopian idea that claims to stop theft when it cannot even do anything about pre-owned sales. Insufferable. Plain, insufferable.
No, ladies and gentlemen, copyright is not "anti-communism" it is PRO communism. You have to get this bit right. Especially when free speech is crushed, governments subsidise the destruction of markets, artists end up being locked out from their own works by parties that took no part in the creative process, technological innovation is repressed bitterly, and the fruits of labour of derivative artists are flat out disposable. Sounds like communism to me.
Ahh, yes. Even as a raging Leftie, I cannot help but praise the free market philosophy here. Crowdfunding is for both indie artists AND mainstream artists.
In fact, on this issue, it is one of those very rare occasions where I WANT the counter-culture to become the over-the-counter-culture. Because the sooner crowdfunding becomes the mainstream way of financing artists, the better. It will be fun to see copyright believers attempt to dismiss it. A way of funding artists' fruits of labour that DOESN'T depend on copyright, and does not come with any liberty compromises? Nooooo? It COULDN'T be? AND derivative artist's fruits of labour are protected to boot? GET OUT!
Yes indeed: the words "capitalism" and "revolution" can be uttered in the same breath.
"[We want to] change social attitudes toward downloading. Many people know it is illegal but they continue to do it... Our collective goal is not to sue everybody… but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property.”
Perhaps it is your social attitude that needs to change, in particular when people feel that it is appropriate to lock people up for doing the same thing as borrowing DVDs from friends.
And perhaps you need to change the sense of unjustified entitlement copyright law has when it comes to claiming authority despite its irrationality.
It is probably better to say this: "piracy" does not really exist in an economic system where creativity is treated as services, not products. That sounds tautological, but considering how it is a much better way of stopping people from free-riding it is worth talking about.
You may be opening doors with me if you said there are some costs required for the storage of data. For example, Dropbox, MediaFire, MegaUpload, etc all have fees of their own; specifically for the speed of downloads and for the uploading of large files. There has to be money involved somewhere for hosting servers.
That I think is legitimate. But what I cannot see being sensible is trying to use these costs to guard the IP solely. That is quite different from the storage of data. If what you say is true, that paywalls are inevitable for one reason or another, you have still said nothing about how to stop the piracy of the internet.
Re: Wrong animal. Pirates are RATS eating the seed corn.
It is COPYRIGHT that prevents people from getting their due rewards.
I resent your implication that the copyright infringers who upload such great art to deviantArt have to surrender their rights in the name of "protecting fruits of labour". Do you not know the definition of doublethink?
Forget copyright, push forward with assurance contracts, and stop being such a Luddite.
Re:
It is tempting to say "conspiracy" even from the quotation I have given above, but in all honesty the best explanation is incompetence.
(untitled comment)
"Gee... I hope it's not those guys from the flight schools in the Midwest" - George Tenet after seeing the planes hit the towers.
There was a crystal ball, you stupid fuck.
Stupid dumbasses.
This is beyond hysterical. It will not work.
Everyone knows that implementing the six-strikes policy on citizens is the best way of preventing them from ever getting their hands on unauthorised material.
I mean for goodness sake. Does NOBODY know that installing DRM on everything is a proven method of stopping traitors, in this case NSA staff, from engaging in any kind of spying? Now do not get me wrong. It is not like you need to do tons of cross-referencing after you have built a giant database of copyrighted data or anything.
That would be silly. INSTEAD, you need to wait until a website like MegaUpload builds it up for you and steal that. It saves you a lot of legal hassle.
Just look at how well Xbox One is doing. All this media coverage, all this hate, and still NOBODY has been able to pirate a game yet! THAT is DRM in action, folks! Oh, I also heard that Microsoft have installed software on their Kinect systems to automatically blur out any other monitor in the room in case it is playing copyrighted material. See? Even MICROSOFT will not take the opportunity to pirate! That is how serious they are! The system can work! So take THAT, Gmail! Attachments promote piracy - never forget.
So there you go. I am now going to read Dragonball Z on my lovely JManga app. I just bought the whole series a few days ago for just £100! Fucking bargain! This app brings my childhood back to life. Almost as if the Dragonballs wished it back, eh? Aww... last episode was SO funny. Dendee had made the wish to transport everyone on the planet Namek to the planet Earth except for Goku and Frieza, and as everyone on Namek is teleporting, Vegeta who had just been brought back to life flies over to a startled Frieza who cannot believe Vegeta is alive. "You must be a ghost!", claims Frieza. And Vegeta replies,
"Can a ghost do THIS, FRIEZA?!"
But before he can charge his energy ball to attack Frieza, he JUST TELEPORTS AND DISAPPEARS INTO THIN AIR! LOL!
I love irony.
Re: Re: How are those doing in no-cost ebook form on The Pirate Bay?
Tell that to the Soviet dissidents of the 20th century who were forced to pirate the book in order to evade the secret police.
And the Iranians now who are forced to pirate copies of Animal Farm.
Not to mention a lot of the Chinese who need to smuggle goods underground in order to a) avoid the eyes of the secret police and b) get by the government's trade restrictions that are deliberately designed to take advantage of copyright law's existence.
I keep saying - to attack the Chinese government's cheating of free trade through monopoly of piracy, you need to get rid of the monopoly system that is causing it, which is copyright law.
Re: Guess same way Google both SPIES and "serves".
When the government starts using DRM to gather this data, you will probably come up with the most ridiculous amateur-psychoanalysis ever:
"Government tendencies to overreach their powers by using DRM through corporation backdoors, are NOT in fact due to a long history of states trying to exert their powers using whatever means necessary... but are instead down to, wait for it, pirates. Pirates who DARE to demonstrate that DRM is a utopian fantasy. Aren't I a genius?"
You should surely see how I, as a materialist, am perfectly entitled to treat this view in the same way I treat the Creationist view of the world?
Re: Should be IP Theft BY China, NOT from.
"And are again doing so now in Syria."
I'm sorry, but fuck you.
Re:
Also, expect crowdfunding websites to be blocked in China soon if they haven't been already.
Again, secret sympathy.
(untitled comment)
You know what would stop China having such a monopoly on piracy?
Reducing copyright terms.
Al Capone had a secret sympathy with the prohibition amendment, and we all know it.
Re: This is a hard one to counter because everyone needs to work together
There is also the "anti-propaganda's propaganda" effect.
"Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Most of the rational people making the case for taking out Saddam knew there was no WMD at the time, but that was not the end of the story. He was a genocidal, totalitarian, Big Brother - the sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands and we couldn't lift the sanctions/no-fly-zones in case he tried to kill the Kurds again or try to get Iran/Kuwait again. There was very little alternative from historical experience. If he didn't implode the country, Uday and Qusay certainly would have. If it were anyone else - the killers of Rwanda, Darfur, Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Burmese generals, Assad in Syria, the military of North Korea or fucking Joseph Kony - our need to take them out would be indisputable." "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD" "Saddam had no WMD"
Rationality means neither having blind faith in leaders NOR doing the exact opposite of what your leaders say. It means looking at evidence, argument, being dialectical, avoiding cliche, not being a megaphone for anybody, coming up with your own unique rhetoric, being willing to stand in front of millions of people and tell them they've all bought into an ad populum fallacy without blinking, and this is most important of all: being willing to self-scrutinise and not being afraid to change your mind about something even after being incredibly committed to the other side. All of this. The only way one can claim to be rational with any credibility at all is if one accepts how fallible and prone to bias one is.
I think there are genuine threats that can be born out of the internet. I'm queasy about the 2nd amendment but I cannot help paraphrase the NRA's mantra and substitute one key word to demonstrate what I mean: "the internet doesn't free people, people free people."
It disturbs me when the Chinese government, for example, sets up fake opposition blog websites in order to lure dissenters and snares them unexpectedly when the time is right. It disturbs me when Islamic fascists will crowdsource protest videos in order to identify the protesters and murder them the next time they step outside their houses. It disturbs me when everything you potentially send on the internet cannot be undone since it is a huge recording machine, and future employers can find it easier than ever to hold one embarrassing moment against you at every turn. It disturbs me how, as someone who believes in separation of powers, power has accumulated very centrally in terms of cloud computing (personal data being stolen in one swoop in the Megaupload raid - because apparently the actions of a few people were excuse enough to shut down a whole company), Google being effectively the centre of the internet, and ISPs having too many bottle necks of the economy due to globalisation effects. It disturbs me how witch-hunt and mob mentalities can spring up easier than before, whether it is using Blackberries to start riots in England, falsely naming names in sex-predator hysteria, or Reddit turning vigilante over an innocent person. It disturbs me how conservative many media organisations are being about the utopian fantasy that is copyright law, and how they keep pushing forward anti-piracy laws with all kinds of slippery slopes while hiding behind copyright as a veto, against seemingly no real opposition in Parliaments.
When it comes to that last point, I hope the irony isn't lost on everyone. As long as you are willing to stand up for intellectual honesty when it comes to, say, copyright being extended infinitely and on no basis, you end up realising that the "cyber" war was declared on YOU, and not the other way around.
However - the arguments about liberty, privacy, and freedom remain the same. The internet has done little to change them. Some change, yes, but not much. The metaphor I use to describe the internet's role in politics and a lot of other things is that it is a "catalyst" - it doesn't change the chemical reaction, but it speeds it up and gives it more life. This is true for the good and the bad.
Re: What a whiney baby
Copyright crushes the incomes of derivative artists, and therefore their freedom of speech.
So nope.
Re: Why am I not surprised?
"But the only great principle they're defending is that they're too cheap and lazy to do their own work."
The principle is that derivative artists have rights to their fruits of labour.
Telling different versions of Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Lion King IS "doing your own work". And copyright deprives artists of the right to do that.
What do you think websites like deviantArt and fanfiction.net have been doing for so long? Unless you want to really be consistent and say that these websites should be shut down, you're going to have to step back and see how copyright is AGAINST the principles of John Locke, not for them.
Crowdfunding, whether its through the many tried and tested examples of collecting tickets for gigs, or through Kickstarter, or pre-ordered copies of DVDs, is superior to copyright in every way because both original and derivative artists have their fruits of labour protected. It makes copyright discreditable from every angle.
You are not entitled to say how you are best defending the "rights of artists". So many markets have been wiped out as a result of the communist-tendencies of copyright and the life, liberty and property has been sucked out of derivative artists for too long. Crowdfunding gives us no excuse for it.
There. And I didn't have to mention how you've exculpated the accountability of corporations for what they do through using pirates as scapegoats. "Since the pirates are running riot, why should be do anything about privacy invasions?" I think there are even many principled copyright maximalists who could call you out for this nonsense. It is a matter of principle. The Patriot Act is to be opposed unequivocally, and I say this as somebody who supports the fight against Islamic fascism. It's the same thing.
(untitled comment)
"Copyright won the cold war."
LOL
What he means is "pirated copies of 1984 and Animal Farm circulating under the Soviet Union's radar" helped to win the cold war. The Soviets would have used any excuse to stop material like that from spreading. And that would have included copyright.
Always remember, every time a government censors an opinion they are in effect making an "intellectual property" claim on that opinion. You cannot say that because that idea belongs to us and noone else. Only we get to decide if that should be said. You must first ask us for permission. It is the same idea.
The Chinese population are highly lacking in internet, and when they DO have internet it is under high surveillance and restrictions. ITunes is heavily blocked. Indeed, it is hard to access any site from outside China while within China because it is so bad. So yeah, think SOPA but a hundred times worse. And what is the world piracy rate of the country? 80% That is what happens WITHOUT BitTorrent. The copyright advocates are deluding themselves when they say copyright needs "more protection". It's a blatant utopian delusion.
Nowadays, we can only pass around pirated copies of Animal Farm within Iran. Even Christopher Hitchens played a part in distributing the pirated copies when he visited the country in secret. He said of the Iranian mullahs (paraphrasing) "I love how they keep trying to show footage of themselves smashing the satellite dishes in order to prove a point. They aren't fooling anyone. It'll never work. Most Iranians know how to make international phone calls. Many server work-arounds are made to counter every move these thugs make. The more attempts at oppression, the more humourous it gets. We're going to see great things from Iran."
But of course, all of this has to be stopped in the name of a utopian idea that claims to stop theft when it cannot even do anything about pre-owned sales. Insufferable. Plain, insufferable.
No, ladies and gentlemen, copyright is not "anti-communism" it is PRO communism. You have to get this bit right. Especially when free speech is crushed, governments subsidise the destruction of markets, artists end up being locked out from their own works by parties that took no part in the creative process, technological innovation is repressed bitterly, and the fruits of labour of derivative artists are flat out disposable. Sounds like communism to me.
Don't buy into this mentality for a second.
Re:
"You haven't shown that there is no such evidence."
You haven't heard of Russell's Teapot, have you?
(untitled comment)
Ahh, yes. Even as a raging Leftie, I cannot help but praise the free market philosophy here. Crowdfunding is for both indie artists AND mainstream artists.
In fact, on this issue, it is one of those very rare occasions where I WANT the counter-culture to become the over-the-counter-culture. Because the sooner crowdfunding becomes the mainstream way of financing artists, the better. It will be fun to see copyright believers attempt to dismiss it. A way of funding artists' fruits of labour that DOESN'T depend on copyright, and does not come with any liberty compromises? Nooooo? It COULDN'T be? AND derivative artist's fruits of labour are protected to boot? GET OUT!
Yes indeed: the words "capitalism" and "revolution" can be uttered in the same breath.
(untitled comment)
"[We want to] change social attitudes toward downloading. Many people know it is illegal but they continue to do it... Our collective goal is not to sue everybody… but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property.”
Perhaps it is your social attitude that needs to change, in particular when people feel that it is appropriate to lock people up for doing the same thing as borrowing DVDs from friends.
And perhaps you need to change the sense of unjustified entitlement copyright law has when it comes to claiming authority despite its irrationality.
Re: Re: Re: NOT "a valuable contribution to the field" -- IT'S A SURVEY.
"Yeah, maybe the corporations WISH they weren't, but they are."
Why shouldn't they? It is theft to take something from the artist without giving anything in return, isn't it?
Re: WALL OF TEXT is Mike's homage to stupid lawyers.
I borrow DVDs.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
It is probably better to say this: "piracy" does not really exist in an economic system where creativity is treated as services, not products. That sounds tautological, but considering how it is a much better way of stopping people from free-riding it is worth talking about.
Re: Re:
You may be opening doors with me if you said there are some costs required for the storage of data. For example, Dropbox, MediaFire, MegaUpload, etc all have fees of their own; specifically for the speed of downloads and for the uploading of large files. There has to be money involved somewhere for hosting servers.
That I think is legitimate. But what I cannot see being sensible is trying to use these costs to guard the IP solely. That is quite different from the storage of data. If what you say is true, that paywalls are inevitable for one reason or another, you have still said nothing about how to stop the piracy of the internet.