Theft of property? No, but it is censorship and a violation of their copyright. If the copytrolls can't use theft to describe infringement, where do we get the right to make the same fallacious claim that we chastised them for?
If they can't call it theft because it isn't, then we can't call it theft for the very same reason, because it's not theft. They still have their master copy (at least they should if they were smart). You're justifying the same terminology and backwards reasoning the trolls use. In essence, you're acting just as badly as they are.
The only thing that might even come close to theft would be NBC claiming ownership of the copyright that applies to that video, but even that is a stretch.
They have severe data caps on most of their ISP's. How can they download software if they have a 10-20GB cap per month?
I'd like to see a side by side comparison of their reductions rates and the rate that people are accessing legal software from online sources. I have a feeling that the low data caps are reducing legal traffic as well.
That's the problem with corporations, they are externalizing machines. They do their best to pass off the costs and consequences of doing business on others so that they don't have to deal with it themselves. Neither corporation can figure out an internal solution to their problem, so they seek an external solution through removing the competition with the assumption that without any competition, they will get all of the business. This line of thought is inherently flawed, because it doesn't matter that you have no competitors if nobody wants your product, despite the total lack of alternatives. So they proceed to blame the competitors for their misfortune and find as many litigious vectors as they can to block competition. When in truth, if they just made their own products better (i.e. innovate), they would be on much better footing and they wouldn't need to find anything actionable against the competitors.
I never said it was easy, I said it was a process. It's a process that anyone can perform if they want to make the effort, but by no means does that imply that it's "easy". Not everyone is going to want to focus the majority of their time making content because they have other occupations that attract their passion.
Explain to me what is "quality" content? If you say content made by a "professional", then you'd be wrong. Quality is entirely arbitrary to the observer. What is "quality" to you may not be so to others and trying to set up a special class of content is elitist and arrogant. Content is content, only I can determine what I think is "quality" to me. What is quality to you is entirely your own opinion. It's not universal.
It makes perfect sense, you just don't want to admit that artists aren't something special and set above "uncreative" people. Artists are just people that have committed to investing their cognitive effort and the majority of their time into creating. We all have disciplines we gravitate towards, but it doesn't mean that we are somehow destined to follow that path. Artists weren't born creative, they had to practice it until they could produce work that people want to pay for. Everyone has the capacity to be creative. That doesn't mean everyone should be creating their own content, but anyone can if they really want to. Creativity is a skill, like any other. It just takes time and patience to hone it.
Creating content for yourself would be pointless. When you work on your content, it's impossible for you to experience it the way your audience does because you have perfect information of the whole work, there are no mysteries, no surprises, and no speculation for you, because you know the work inside and out. But if you want to suggest that people make their own content and share that, then I say go to Youtube. They have tons of user generated content and some of it is very good. I enjoy a selection of works there myself. It covers a very broad range of tastes that mainstream content fails to address due to being niche, and therefore unprofitable.
Creativity is a process. You start with the roughest most obvious version of your expression and you refine little by little until it becomes something new.
Are you really going to equate something physical and finite, like a car, to something that is intangible and infinite, like information? They just aren't the same. If I take your car, you don't have it. If I copy your music, you still have it and now I do too. It's a good thing for people to have unlimited access to culture and knowledge, because we are all the better for it. Holding content for ransom, giving copies to only those that can pay, limits the beneficial properties of culture because culture that isn't experienced can't affect anyone at all. An idea is worthless if it can't be divulged to others and acted upon. How would the disciplines that rely on math be different if Newton kept calculus under lock and key? Hell, how would that change human progress in its entirety? What great advancements are we missing out on because some snobby people want to hold on to their antiquated monopolies? It's far more damaging to deny society access to works than to nullify an author's favored business model.
Creativity isn't an ethereal talent granted to a chosen few to set them above the rank and file. Creativity is a process. Just like building a car is a process. It is a process of taking what one has learned and finding a new expression or commentary on it.
We are also taught not to hoard that which we can freely give without depriving ourselves possession of it. Sharing culture is far more moral than holding it for ransom. Using copyright is hoarding knowledge and culture from the masses in order to extract money from those that can afford it. Culture and knowledge, for those that can afford it.
We're not talking about property here. If you want to call it property, then tell me this: How can it be your property, when it's made up from your collective experiences with the works of others? How can you claim property over something that is built on the works of thousands of generations of artists? Tell me, how? Every time one of you copyright shills gets red in the face about sharing, you troll up a storm how people are violating your property, even though you've transformed and remixed everything that came before you. You take the collective works from the entirety of history and claim that it's "yours" when you transform them. How egotistical! How selfish and greedy! You took that which wasn't yours, that which overlaps the works of every other creator throughout history and put a metaphorical box on it call it a discreet unit of property, your property. You cannot claim property over that which defies and supersedes any attempt to hold in exclusivity.
Sharing allows culture and knowledge to touch a greater number of minds, which expands their understanding of the world around them. It inspires them to create works of their own using what they've learned from other works as their foundation. Copyright serves only to restrict that access to those that meet a proprietor's wishes. Sharing culture and knowledge can only improve society, so guess what copyright does to it?
This guy is stuck on the idea that the content is what they're selling and if you're not controlling access to that content you can't bring in revenue. That's just silly. He didn't seem all that willing to listen and just rebutted with all the misguided counter-arguments that have been refuted already. This guy has no idea what he's selling. He's also ignorant of the fact that, like Mike pointed out, people will leave you for free content. It's vain (not to mention stupid) to think that nobody else can do what you do. If anything the internet has made clear, there is no such thing as unique and scarce content. People everywhere make content just for the love of content. There are journalism sites with free content, journalist blogs, and on ad infinitum. If you're charging for what other people give away, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage.
I've been a regular reader at TechDirt for several years now and they consistently provide me with content I find worth reading and it sparks some really great debates. I haven't spent any money on the site myself being of very meager means, but I can see that you can very much give away your content if you provide goods and services for sale that make the free content you provide have even greater value to the readers. Mike has formed a loyal and supportive community around the free content he provides. He then offers the community that he works so hard to maintain things that make the free stuff even better.
He's laid the foundation for a viral community that he can leverage as a source of revenue. The content is the lure that brings the readers in and other things that make the content more valuable to them is the hook. Free content spreads like wildfire and more exposure is always good. Had he made his model that of a paywall or metered, he would have hindered the viral nature of this community and it would likely be much smaller. It would likely be less profitable as well. Mike has rightly understood that the content is his advertising, his calling card, his bullhorn on the street to get the attention of potential readers. He also knows how to make money from enough of those readers to make a successful business.
Once you realize that you never can and never will have any control over anything you publish, it all gets very simple. You change your methods something you can control. I like the serman given by Phillip Seymore Hoffman in the movie Doubt. In the serman the priest tells the gossiping woman to tear open a pillow from on top of her roof and scatter the feathers to the wind. Then he tells her a day later to go recollect the feathers. When she says she can't, he says this is how gossip works. That is also how publishing works. You put it out there and it's laid bare to all to do with as they will, whether you want them to or not. When you realize that you're trying to put the feathers back in the pillow, you know that it's impossible. If more creators would realize this, they would know how futile and backwards it is to hold on to copyright.
It think it's not so much the government turning to fascism today as it is corporations are turning fascist. The MPAA, RIAA, and the ESA all seem to want to force censorship upon us. Corporations buy off the government in order to spread fascist agendas that increase their profits and establish monopolies. They use "pirates" as scapegoats to push laws that protect their monopolies in the content industry and turn anyone trying to create their own content outside of their control into a criminal. ICE has been given near carte blanche authority to take down websites if any corporation even whispers "infringement" without due process or even a chance for legal defense. They even go so far as to blame terrorism on infringement (i.e. "The pirates are funding terrorism with their downloading!"). Yeah, I think the latest regime of fascism will come from the private sector rather than the public sector.
A false dichotomy, ad hominem, and non sequitur all in one sentence. Nice.
All of that crap you pointed out is irrelevant. Google can say they are for the protection of orphans in Timbuktu, but that doesn't change what their search engine does. Just because TPB makes parody of the inapplicable takedown demands they receive, doesn't change the fact that they do the same thing as Google. I can easily find links to infringing content through Google.
You're not seeing the big picture. Google is a search engine and TPB is a search engine, end of story. Neither is any more wrong than the other because they both enable the same thing. The only difference that matters is how people use it. People use Google to find things, but they also use it to find illegal content. TPB is no different, except that it indexes magnet links exclusively. Neither will offer up infringing content until YOU ASK FOR IT. So don't give me this grandiose moral outrage that TPB is inherently illegal, because it's not. It hosts no content, it has no involvement in the transfer of infringing content. Not one infringing byte of content is passed through their servers, it's peer to peer. It's a passive index of magnet links. It won't offer you any infringing content that you don't ask for. If you search for "Ubuntu ISO" (a free version of Linux) you'll get that in your results, but if you search "The Hurt Locker", it will most definitely offer you links to people seeding infringing copies of that movie.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I thought bob was a hemorrhoid. Isn't that a bit recursive?
Re: Re: I'm expecting this
Theft of property? No, but it is censorship and a violation of their copyright. If the copytrolls can't use theft to describe infringement, where do we get the right to make the same fallacious claim that we chastised them for?
If they can't call it theft because it isn't, then we can't call it theft for the very same reason, because it's not theft. They still have their master copy (at least they should if they were smart). You're justifying the same terminology and backwards reasoning the trolls use. In essence, you're acting just as badly as they are.
The only thing that might even come close to theft would be NBC claiming ownership of the copyright that applies to that video, but even that is a stretch.
Of course Canada would be dropping.
They have severe data caps on most of their ISP's. How can they download software if they have a 10-20GB cap per month?
I'd like to see a side by side comparison of their reductions rates and the rate that people are accessing legal software from online sources. I have a feeling that the low data caps are reducing legal traffic as well.
Re: Re: Money is food for fools
That's the problem with corporations, they are externalizing machines. They do their best to pass off the costs and consequences of doing business on others so that they don't have to deal with it themselves. Neither corporation can figure out an internal solution to their problem, so they seek an external solution through removing the competition with the assumption that without any competition, they will get all of the business. This line of thought is inherently flawed, because it doesn't matter that you have no competitors if nobody wants your product, despite the total lack of alternatives. So they proceed to blame the competitors for their misfortune and find as many litigious vectors as they can to block competition. When in truth, if they just made their own products better (i.e. innovate), they would be on much better footing and they wouldn't need to find anything actionable against the competitors.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Blame Game
I never said it was easy, I said it was a process. It's a process that anyone can perform if they want to make the effort, but by no means does that imply that it's "easy". Not everyone is going to want to focus the majority of their time making content because they have other occupations that attract their passion.
Explain to me what is "quality" content? If you say content made by a "professional", then you'd be wrong. Quality is entirely arbitrary to the observer. What is "quality" to you may not be so to others and trying to set up a special class of content is elitist and arrogant. Content is content, only I can determine what I think is "quality" to me. What is quality to you is entirely your own opinion. It's not universal.
It makes perfect sense, you just don't want to admit that artists aren't something special and set above "uncreative" people. Artists are just people that have committed to investing their cognitive effort and the majority of their time into creating. We all have disciplines we gravitate towards, but it doesn't mean that we are somehow destined to follow that path. Artists weren't born creative, they had to practice it until they could produce work that people want to pay for. Everyone has the capacity to be creative. That doesn't mean everyone should be creating their own content, but anyone can if they really want to. Creativity is a skill, like any other. It just takes time and patience to hone it.
Creating content for yourself would be pointless. When you work on your content, it's impossible for you to experience it the way your audience does because you have perfect information of the whole work, there are no mysteries, no surprises, and no speculation for you, because you know the work inside and out. But if you want to suggest that people make their own content and share that, then I say go to Youtube. They have tons of user generated content and some of it is very good. I enjoy a selection of works there myself. It covers a very broad range of tastes that mainstream content fails to address due to being niche, and therefore unprofitable.
Creativity is a process. You start with the roughest most obvious version of your expression and you refine little by little until it becomes something new.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Blame Game
Are you really going to equate something physical and finite, like a car, to something that is intangible and infinite, like information? They just aren't the same. If I take your car, you don't have it. If I copy your music, you still have it and now I do too. It's a good thing for people to have unlimited access to culture and knowledge, because we are all the better for it. Holding content for ransom, giving copies to only those that can pay, limits the beneficial properties of culture because culture that isn't experienced can't affect anyone at all. An idea is worthless if it can't be divulged to others and acted upon. How would the disciplines that rely on math be different if Newton kept calculus under lock and key? Hell, how would that change human progress in its entirety? What great advancements are we missing out on because some snobby people want to hold on to their antiquated monopolies? It's far more damaging to deny society access to works than to nullify an author's favored business model.
Creativity isn't an ethereal talent granted to a chosen few to set them above the rank and file. Creativity is a process. Just like building a car is a process. It is a process of taking what one has learned and finding a new expression or commentary on it.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Blame Game
We are also taught not to hoard that which we can freely give without depriving ourselves possession of it. Sharing culture is far more moral than holding it for ransom. Using copyright is hoarding knowledge and culture from the masses in order to extract money from those that can afford it. Culture and knowledge, for those that can afford it.
Re:
Well, when you realize that copyright isn't even necessary, it kind of pulls the rug from under it in terms of respectability.
Re: Re: Blame Game
We're not talking about property here. If you want to call it property, then tell me this: How can it be your property, when it's made up from your collective experiences with the works of others? How can you claim property over something that is built on the works of thousands of generations of artists? Tell me, how? Every time one of you copyright shills gets red in the face about sharing, you troll up a storm how people are violating your property, even though you've transformed and remixed everything that came before you. You take the collective works from the entirety of history and claim that it's "yours" when you transform them. How egotistical! How selfish and greedy! You took that which wasn't yours, that which overlaps the works of every other creator throughout history and put a metaphorical box on it call it a discreet unit of property, your property. You cannot claim property over that which defies and supersedes any attempt to hold in exclusivity.
Sharing allows culture and knowledge to touch a greater number of minds, which expands their understanding of the world around them. It inspires them to create works of their own using what they've learned from other works as their foundation. Copyright serves only to restrict that access to those that meet a proprietor's wishes. Sharing culture and knowledge can only improve society, so guess what copyright does to it?
He just doesn't get it.
This guy is stuck on the idea that the content is what they're selling and if you're not controlling access to that content you can't bring in revenue. That's just silly. He didn't seem all that willing to listen and just rebutted with all the misguided counter-arguments that have been refuted already. This guy has no idea what he's selling. He's also ignorant of the fact that, like Mike pointed out, people will leave you for free content. It's vain (not to mention stupid) to think that nobody else can do what you do. If anything the internet has made clear, there is no such thing as unique and scarce content. People everywhere make content just for the love of content. There are journalism sites with free content, journalist blogs, and on ad infinitum. If you're charging for what other people give away, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage.
I've been a regular reader at TechDirt for several years now and they consistently provide me with content I find worth reading and it sparks some really great debates. I haven't spent any money on the site myself being of very meager means, but I can see that you can very much give away your content if you provide goods and services for sale that make the free content you provide have even greater value to the readers. Mike has formed a loyal and supportive community around the free content he provides. He then offers the community that he works so hard to maintain things that make the free stuff even better.
He's laid the foundation for a viral community that he can leverage as a source of revenue. The content is the lure that brings the readers in and other things that make the content more valuable to them is the hook. Free content spreads like wildfire and more exposure is always good. Had he made his model that of a paywall or metered, he would have hindered the viral nature of this community and it would likely be much smaller. It would likely be less profitable as well. Mike has rightly understood that the content is his advertising, his calling card, his bullhorn on the street to get the attention of potential readers. He also knows how to make money from enough of those readers to make a successful business.
Re:
Forget the dark ages, we have that right now. Tipper Gore anyone? Jack Thompson?
Re:
Better yet. If a censor smashes his thumb while alone in the woods, does he make beep? @#$% no!
Re:
That's why? I thought their culture had just homogenized. "The more you know!"
Re: Re: Difference Between Twain and Masnick
I forget him on a regular basis.
Re: Re: Re:
Once you realize that you never can and never will have any control over anything you publish, it all gets very simple. You change your methods something you can control. I like the serman given by Phillip Seymore Hoffman in the movie Doubt. In the serman the priest tells the gossiping woman to tear open a pillow from on top of her roof and scatter the feathers to the wind. Then he tells her a day later to go recollect the feathers. When she says she can't, he says this is how gossip works. That is also how publishing works. You put it out there and it's laid bare to all to do with as they will, whether you want them to or not. When you realize that you're trying to put the feathers back in the pillow, you know that it's impossible. If more creators would realize this, they would know how futile and backwards it is to hold on to copyright.
Re: Re: Re: No thats great
Nah, just put it in sleep mode. It will pop right back to life.
Re: Re: Re:
I thought it was powered by sunshine and farts!
Fascism
It think it's not so much the government turning to fascism today as it is corporations are turning fascist. The MPAA, RIAA, and the ESA all seem to want to force censorship upon us. Corporations buy off the government in order to spread fascist agendas that increase their profits and establish monopolies. They use "pirates" as scapegoats to push laws that protect their monopolies in the content industry and turn anyone trying to create their own content outside of their control into a criminal. ICE has been given near carte blanche authority to take down websites if any corporation even whispers "infringement" without due process or even a chance for legal defense. They even go so far as to blame terrorism on infringement (i.e. "The pirates are funding terrorism with their downloading!"). Yeah, I think the latest regime of fascism will come from the private sector rather than the public sector.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Entitled?
I really don't think going against one's wishes is an ethical boundary, I just used it to counter their reasoning with their own logic.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Entitled?
A false dichotomy, ad hominem, and non sequitur all in one sentence. Nice.
All of that crap you pointed out is irrelevant. Google can say they are for the protection of orphans in Timbuktu, but that doesn't change what their search engine does. Just because TPB makes parody of the inapplicable takedown demands they receive, doesn't change the fact that they do the same thing as Google. I can easily find links to infringing content through Google.
You're not seeing the big picture. Google is a search engine and TPB is a search engine, end of story. Neither is any more wrong than the other because they both enable the same thing. The only difference that matters is how people use it. People use Google to find things, but they also use it to find illegal content. TPB is no different, except that it indexes magnet links exclusively. Neither will offer up infringing content until YOU ASK FOR IT. So don't give me this grandiose moral outrage that TPB is inherently illegal, because it's not. It hosts no content, it has no involvement in the transfer of infringing content. Not one infringing byte of content is passed through their servers, it's peer to peer. It's a passive index of magnet links. It won't offer you any infringing content that you don't ask for. If you search for "Ubuntu ISO" (a free version of Linux) you'll get that in your results, but if you search "The Hurt Locker", it will most definitely offer you links to people seeding infringing copies of that movie.