Permit me to address a few things in a way that is contrary, maybe, to the common HN reader's sentiments. I'd like a serious discussion of said matters rather than knee-jerk reactions.
1) "It's not stealing, because you only take a copy". We're playing with words here. First, the point is not the common definition of the word, it's what a court deems "stealing". Second, even in everyday life, we say things like "he stole the exam answers" or "He stole the recipe" (when in fact he only read them).
2) "The losses are imaginary, because not everybody would have bought the stuff he pirated". Sure, the estimations of the losses are imaginary. All estimations are imaginary --by the very definition. You can argue about the accuracy of the estimations, but not of the need of an estimation (even if you put that estimated loss to zero).
Also, the fact that "not everybody would have bought the stuff he pirated" bypasses two things:
a) some people WOULD have bought the stuff, because they want it, if it wasn't available for them in pirated form. Those are actual money lost (I have downloaded for free lots of things that I would have bought if they weren't available because I just had to have them. Surely, other people have too. How many, is the topic of the aforementioned estimation).
b) those that would never in any case had paid for the item, do not represent "actual lost money". But they have violated the wish of the content creator/distributor regarding the (paid) use of his product. This can also be punishable by law, and fined, and in many legal systems, it is.
This "respect of the will" of the copyright owner, is like GPL etc works. If you want GPL respected, you also want copyright respected, even if the owner is not using a permissive license. Because the court doesn't upheld GPL for it's permissiveness, but because of it being a copyright license.
3) "The creator gets nothing anyway, it's all the big media". This doesn't matter. For one, people still pirate things that are sold by their creators directly. People have pirated even the Radiohead "pay what you want" album.
Second, if the creator sold the rights to some "big media" company, that's his choice (or mistake) to make. That doesn't mean you have the right to grab a copy of his work as you see fit.
Third, for a lot of the content the creator is the big media company. People pirate like crazy BS teen-pop idols and hollywood blockbuster movies, which represent like 1% creative talent and 99% big media bucks for effects, marketing and production.
4) "Their business model is broken, they should find something else to make money" - Actually their business model is not broken. They make and sell something people want. The only broken part is that people copy it for free and give it around illegally. If I get me some GPL code, and make a closed source black box extended program out of it without giving back my source, just because I can, would people say that the "GPL model is broken"?
5) "People only pirate because the prices are absurdly high / the buying process is inconvenient" - Well, companies can set their prices to whatever they want for their own stuff, and they can make the buying process as convoluted as they want. That's not an argument in favor or copyright infringement, as much as high prices for Ferraris is not an argument in favor of stealing them, and the difficulty of attaining a university degree is not an argument for printing a fake in our printer.
6) "They can make it up on concerts" - Directors and shrink-wrapped software programmers don't give many concerts.
And even for musicians, a lot of musicians don't like giving concerts. Not everyone is like your local bar band or Rolling Stones. Especially in modern kinds of music, from electronica to ambient, there are lots of people that don't like playing concerts that much or feel that that is not their artistic medium (even the Beatles stopped playing concerts after '65). They still deserve some money for the use of their work.
Even for artists that DO play concerts, a gig used to be mostly a loss leader for album sales. The only people making big money from concerts are mainly established artists with a managerial team, everything organized, big following and sold out venues and bands with a largish cult following (think Phish, Pearl Jam, etc). That doesn't bode well for artists that still used to make a decent living selling around 50.000-100.000 albums a year. Some artists also have actual integrity and don't want to be seen dead selling "merchandise". Not everything is "rock'n'roll".
7) "What's the proof of piracy's harm? Record company profits are at a high this year" - How is this contradictory? One can have record profits and still be ripped off. The sets of "people buying record company stuff" (profits) VS the number of "people that WOULD have bought record company stuff but they download it illegally" (actual lost money due to piracy) are not the same set.
Those are some arguments.
My personal opinion?
1) Software patents must go. Especially trivial. A patent period of 5 years of actual use of the patent in production seems ok for everything else.
2) Copyright must be restricted. 20-30 years at max.
3) Illegal downloading should remain illegal. Not everything should be available for free against the owner's wish. "Metallica" releases and "The managing secrets of Attila the Hun" books are not an undeniable right for everybody, there are just stuff for sale. There are lots of copyleft software, music and books, one can use.
1. The so called "illegal downloads" aren't illegal. It's the uploads that are illegal. Hence the downloads can't "remain" illegal.
2. The courts do not deem copyright infringement to be "theft". They deem it to be "copyright infringement".
3. A productive balance of interests between creators and consumers is probably more intricate than "all rights go to producers, no matter how convoluted they want to make the lives of consumers" or "all rights go to consumers". The reason why producers are given imaginary property rights is to facilitate development of useful arts (it says so right there in the American constitution), not because those rights are "holy" like right a right to live.
1. The so called "illegal downloads" aren't illegal. It's the uploads that are illegal. Hence the downloads can't "remain" illegal.
I'm not sure I follow. If the uploads are illegal, how are the downloads not so? Isn't it something analogous of "possession of stolen goods"? Or, to avoid the word "stealing", like directly benefiting from an illegal activity? The downloaders also violate the copyright of the content owner.
2. The courts do not deem copyright infringement to be "theft". They deem it to be "copyright infringement".
The term "intellectual property theft" is also used in court (even more so in other countries). And in the US Legal Code, copyright infringement laws fall under the "stolen property" category:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sup_01_1...
Specifically, "§ 2319. Criminal infringement of a copyright" is a subcategory of: "CHAPTER 113—STOLEN PROPERTY".
This might also be relevant: "In Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster, Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Stevens and O’Connor, said, “deliberate unlawful copying is no less an unlawful taking of property than garden-variety theft.”
The Supreme Court has been comfortable referring to copyright infringement as theft on other occasions.
Lower courts and Congress have also used “theft” to describe copyright infringement on various occasions."
>The term "intellectual property theft" is also used in court (even more so in other countries). And in the US Legal Code, copyright infringement laws fall under the "stolen property" category: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sup_01_1....
You say "category and FBI" I say the only thing that matters is Dowling V. United States, which says unambiguously that they are separate and distinct crimes.
Is it the "only thing that matters" though? For one, the Supreme Court is known to reverse it's own rulings, from time to time. Second, the phrasing in this case ruling is far from "unambiguous". For example, it says:
"interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud."
Does not easily? How is this unambiguous? "Does NOT" would indeed be unambiguous, "does not easily" leaves the door open. And later on, they say:
"Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.".
Why the "run-of-the-mill" qualifier? Are they implying it could still be theft, just not the "run-of-the-mill" kind? IANAL, but calling "Dowling V. United States" unambiguous is stretching it. And I doubt it's the "only thing that matters". (Especially since outside the US it does not matter at all).
It is 964 words long to be exact. And all of them have to do with what the Pirate Bay did and does, and with common threads that arise in the discussion of such matters.
That said, if you prefer discussion confined in tidy little boxes, feel free to skip it.
"tidy little boxes"!? What you're waffling on about is an argument spread all over the web that's been had time and time and time again, even just here on HN. You're spoiling for a fight that's already been had far too many times, but are apparently too lazy to bother trying to link it to the article in question.
The irony is that you're arguing in the same little box that's been a battleground so many times before and not trying to incorporate the new event.
It's also not a matter of 'just skipping it', because it's a wall-of-text that's also flamebait - it's quite possible for half the thread to be taken up with the same rehashed arguments that have nothing to do with the article at hand.
If you want to understand, you have to start by doing one thing: stop taking copyright for granted, and imagine it as not a fixture of reality, not like a basic law of physics -- because it isn't.
Copyright is a law we have made, and those who reject it see it as bad and unjustified. From a principled position it is basically immoral, and from a pragmatic position it is unproven by evidence.
From the anti position, all the notions of 'stealing', 'losses', 'will of the creator' no longer exist -- they are entirely dependent on accepting the copyright concept. If there is no copyright, there is no stealing, losses, or primacy of creator's will.
If a law is not justified and well-founded we really ought not to have it. Is that not important?
That's a fair point. I suppose it relates to why people follow laws in general: is it because all laws we've adopted are good? Is it because laws, by virtue of being a law, are good? Is it because we are afraid of being punished for violating the law? These are major legal and political science debates (e.g. H.L.A Hart, Ronald Dworkin, etc.).
Anyhow, point being, although the law may be unjust, punishment for disobeying the law is not either unexpected or unfair. So while we can bemoan that people are punished for violating copyright law, that doesn't mean that they weren't justly punished by a government enforcing the law.
2) that doesn't mean that they weren't justly punished
Didn't you equivocate on "justice" there?
If "justly" only means "legally", the second quote is right. There's a reason why the Department of Law-interpretation-and-enforcement is called "Department of Justice" instead. Lawyers love to think that they're administering justice and not simply a piece of legislation. But we should not fall for this linguistic trick and equivocate justice with what is legal.
Political philosophers often use the word "justice" or "fairness" to refer to some moral ideal that is above existing laws, and which we can appeal to in evaluating existing and proposed laws. There are disagreements about the content of this ideal, of course, but none of that makes the concept of justice less authoritative than positive law. On this definition, the first quote would stand, but the second quote wouldn't make much sense.
There's also a sizable literature on civil disobedience, whereby citizens are morally permitted -- or even required -- to disregard laws that they believe are grossly unfair or unjust (provided that certain other conditions are met). IIRC Dworkin wrote an article or two on this topic, and so did Rawls.
Sure--I don't disagree with you. I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't engage in civil disobedience, in fact, I personally think that people should engage in civil disobedience as often as they feel morally compelled to.
In my last statement (and setting aside the word "just"), I was putting forward the legal positivist (i.e. HLA Hart) viewpoint that laws are valid by virtue of being law (without getting into what "law" is and so on). Accepting that copyright law is therefore a valid law on this level, I don't find its enforcement invalid. This is separate from whether I find the law sensible, or morally reprehensible, or whatever--and, depending on my views on that issue, I might want to disobey it and be justified in doing so. But, even if I think the law is completely insane, that's not saying that I would think of it as some artificial concept that I might completely ignore and then be shocked at being prosecuting for violating it, as a I read a previous post to suggest. By rebelling against it I am tacitly acknowledging that the law is what it is, and I should be prepared to accept the punishments.
Apologies if I am being opaque, it's obviously a minor point that has no real bearing on how people actually act.
Oh, I see. I agree. I wouldn't be surprised that a government tried to enforce positive law, the same way I wouldn't be surprised if the Mafia trashed your store because you failed to pay for protection. Just because the powers that be are wrong doesn't mean that their threats are any less real. To disagree would be naive.
It's also great to meet someone who knows that legal positivism is not incompatible with the existence of valid but unjust laws. Seen too many first-time philosophy of law students who don't seem to understand this!
If you want to understand you have to start by doing one thing: stop taking copyright for granted, and imagine it as not a fixture of reality, not like a basic law of physics -- because it isn't.
Copyright is a law we have made, and those who reject it see it as bad and unjustified.
Who said it isn't "a law we have made"?
I surely did not. I would also drop the patronizing "If you want to understand" start.
I know fully well that copyright is not a physical law.
Access to free copies of things someone else created and sells is not a physical law either. It's something some people want.
I (and the law) happen to find the rights of the creators regarding the distribution and sale of their creation, to be more fundamental than the rights of people merely wanting to have those creations.
And, what I set up to do above is not prove that the copyright law is just or correct as it is, but that some arguments against it (those I examine) don't hold much water.
From a principled position it is basically immoral, and from a pragmatic position it is unproven by evidence
It's a law. It cannot be "unproved by evidence", because it does not make an observation to prove or disprove, but declares how some things are to work.
Even a totally arbitrary law, like: "Every person wearing red should be jailed" cannot be "unproved by evidence".
As for the "basically immoral" you make it sound like a statement of fact. It is not. Lots of people, including legislators, don't see it as immoral.
If a law is not justified and well-founded we really ought not to have it. Is that not important?
Of course. But it must be proved that it's not justified. I don't see many arguments in your comment. You write, for example:
From the anti position, all the notions of 'stealing', 'losses', 'will of the creator' no longer exist -- they are entirely dependent on accepting the copyright concept. If there is no copyright, there is no stealing, losses, or primacy of creator's will.
The same holds true for everything, even for murder. All the notions of murder being bad and illegal depend on the acceptance of the "life is a right" concept. Which is a societal concept, no much concern in raw nature about killing and eating other animals or even your own species.
> Access to free copies of things someone else created and sells is not a physical law either.
Well, this is the thing, it is pretty much a physical law. Information is nonrival: it is infinitely copyable and anyone can use it without reducing access to anyone else. The effort and work to produce information is a scarcity, but once the information is expressed and public it is an abundance.
The whole of the ethics and economics hinges upon this basic physical/logical structure. This is the fundamental fact of the matter, and if it is followed through rationally, all of the normally assumed ethics of copyright unravels.
Paying people for work done to create makes sense. It makes an 'economic' structure that mirrors the basic physical constraints. And it is justified according to its 'economic' effects. You give something up, you get something in return. The individual transaction is fair and square, and the global outcome is a gain from being able to 'move' things around.
None of that much holds for paying for copies. The transaction is not fair and square, it is an unwarranted and unjust restriction of personal freedom of those using the information. And as for the global gain, it seems rather lacking grounds of actual evidence.
> The same holds true for everything, even for murder.
No, there is something of a difference. Murder is outlawed not arbitrarily, but because it is something we do not, in a very basic way, want. It has a grounding in the physical facts of what the act does, and in the physical facts of our reaction to it (as a victim). That physicality gives it an unparalleled strength as something we all agree on.
Copyright has no such physical grounding. Would murder be just as wrong if it could be done without actually killing anyone? You do the same things, but the actual effect is not there? -- perhaps imagine it as a video-game. It is a very different thing. And this is like copying: on the fundamental level it is 'stealing' without the stealing (i.e. not really stealing at all) -- because the basic relation involved is abstract.
Well, this is the thing, it is pretty much a physical law. Information is nonrival: it is infinitely copyable and anyone can use it without reducing access to anyone else. The effort and work to produce information is a scarcity, but once the information is expressed and public it is an abundance.
The problem is that this "scarcity" (to produce information) wants to be compensated too. And it's not only "scarcity", it's also costly to produce information. The fact that you can make 1 billion copies of Adobe Photoshop for free, for example, does not mean Adobe Photoshop itself costs nothing. It costs something like several tens of millions to make in programmer's salaries. Those paying those millions should get to dictate how you pay for it, like the guy that makes a chair gets to dictate how you pay for his chair.
You seem to think that the scarcity of infomation production means nothing at all, when you say e.g.:
Paying people for work done to create makes sense. It makes an 'economic' structure that mirrors the basic physical constraints. And it is justified according to its 'economic' effects. You give something up, you get something in return.
When you buy Photoshop, it's not just bytes downloaded to your PC you get, which cost nearly nothing (= your ISP bill), you ALSO get a slice of the paid, hard, work of hundreds of people in return.
Why are we confusing technological feasibility (free copies are feasible) what what ought to be done (compensate the creator or not)?
A crazy idea to directly make the software sale more akin to a specific item sale (a chair):
The software maker sets an arbitrary total aggregate expected sale price P and a selling goal (say, X units). Anyone buying before X units are sold pays P/X. For anyone buying after it, the price falls P/X+ (and the first buyers are also given their difference back, either directly or in "store credit"). In the end, if they sell a billion copies, people get the program for say a dollar, but it's OK, because the company is compensated. Actually, this makes popular items essentially free or dirt cheap in the end. For this to work, we need a marketplace like the Mac App Store, so those transactions and record-keeping can be automated.
This restricts the artificially huge profits made by controlling the price, and puts a set price to a free copyable item, like a tangible item has, that reflects the work that went into it. It also keeps the risk of the original sale, i.e if the sell < X, they have a loss.
None of that much holds for paying for copies. The transaction is not fair and square, it is an unwarranted and unjust restriction of personal freedom of those using the information. And as for the global gain, it seems rather lacking grounds of actual evidence.
Well, the global IP industry, sales of software, music, books, magazines, etc, is on the level of trillions of dollars. It would be almost zero with totally free copying. So, at the economic level, there is some support for "global gain". And it's not like the culture would be poorer if less Metallica and Lady Gaga albums where freely torrented (yes, I'm a snob like that ;-).
> This "respect of the will" of the copyright owner, is like GPL etc works. If you want GPL respected, you also want copyright respected, even if the owner is not using a permissive license.
This is true to a point. I do not respect copyright as much as you think I should, because I do not believe it should have been extended past its initial 14-year term. As it stands now, copyrights are effectively infinite; this is a complete perversion of the original intention.
1) "It's not stealing, because you only take a copy". We're playing with words here. First, the point is not the common definition of the word, it's what a court deems "stealing". Second, even in everyday life, we say things like "he stole the exam answers" or "He stole the recipe" (when in fact he only read them).
2) "The losses are imaginary, because not everybody would have bought the stuff he pirated". Sure, the estimations of the losses are imaginary. All estimations are imaginary --by the very definition. You can argue about the accuracy of the estimations, but not of the need of an estimation (even if you put that estimated loss to zero).
Also, the fact that "not everybody would have bought the stuff he pirated" bypasses two things:
a) some people WOULD have bought the stuff, because they want it, if it wasn't available for them in pirated form. Those are actual money lost (I have downloaded for free lots of things that I would have bought if they weren't available because I just had to have them. Surely, other people have too. How many, is the topic of the aforementioned estimation).
b) those that would never in any case had paid for the item, do not represent "actual lost money". But they have violated the wish of the content creator/distributor regarding the (paid) use of his product. This can also be punishable by law, and fined, and in many legal systems, it is.
This "respect of the will" of the copyright owner, is like GPL etc works. If you want GPL respected, you also want copyright respected, even if the owner is not using a permissive license. Because the court doesn't upheld GPL for it's permissiveness, but because of it being a copyright license.
3) "The creator gets nothing anyway, it's all the big media". This doesn't matter. For one, people still pirate things that are sold by their creators directly. People have pirated even the Radiohead "pay what you want" album.
Second, if the creator sold the rights to some "big media" company, that's his choice (or mistake) to make. That doesn't mean you have the right to grab a copy of his work as you see fit.
Third, for a lot of the content the creator is the big media company. People pirate like crazy BS teen-pop idols and hollywood blockbuster movies, which represent like 1% creative talent and 99% big media bucks for effects, marketing and production.
4) "Their business model is broken, they should find something else to make money" - Actually their business model is not broken. They make and sell something people want. The only broken part is that people copy it for free and give it around illegally. If I get me some GPL code, and make a closed source black box extended program out of it without giving back my source, just because I can, would people say that the "GPL model is broken"?
5) "People only pirate because the prices are absurdly high / the buying process is inconvenient" - Well, companies can set their prices to whatever they want for their own stuff, and they can make the buying process as convoluted as they want. That's not an argument in favor or copyright infringement, as much as high prices for Ferraris is not an argument in favor of stealing them, and the difficulty of attaining a university degree is not an argument for printing a fake in our printer.
6) "They can make it up on concerts" - Directors and shrink-wrapped software programmers don't give many concerts.
And even for musicians, a lot of musicians don't like giving concerts. Not everyone is like your local bar band or Rolling Stones. Especially in modern kinds of music, from electronica to ambient, there are lots of people that don't like playing concerts that much or feel that that is not their artistic medium (even the Beatles stopped playing concerts after '65). They still deserve some money for the use of their work.
Even for artists that DO play concerts, a gig used to be mostly a loss leader for album sales. The only people making big money from concerts are mainly established artists with a managerial team, everything organized, big following and sold out venues and bands with a largish cult following (think Phish, Pearl Jam, etc). That doesn't bode well for artists that still used to make a decent living selling around 50.000-100.000 albums a year. Some artists also have actual integrity and don't want to be seen dead selling "merchandise". Not everything is "rock'n'roll".
7) "What's the proof of piracy's harm? Record company profits are at a high this year" - How is this contradictory? One can have record profits and still be ripped off. The sets of "people buying record company stuff" (profits) VS the number of "people that WOULD have bought record company stuff but they download it illegally" (actual lost money due to piracy) are not the same set.
Those are some arguments.
My personal opinion?
1) Software patents must go. Especially trivial. A patent period of 5 years of actual use of the patent in production seems ok for everything else.
2) Copyright must be restricted. 20-30 years at max.
3) Illegal downloading should remain illegal. Not everything should be available for free against the owner's wish. "Metallica" releases and "The managing secrets of Attila the Hun" books are not an undeniable right for everybody, there are just stuff for sale. There are lots of copyleft software, music and books, one can use.