Then maybe you can help me understand what it means. Say I write a book but nobody purchases a copy, while thousands of unauthorized copies are downloaded from torrent sites. How does all this "value" put food on my table?
At what point in history has copyright truly been about compensating authors? Copyright began with censorship laws, and eventually came to be nothing more than a government-granted monopoly for printing press operators. Despite the Statute of Anne mentioning authors, it was the lobbying pressure by printers who sought a competitive advantage that led to that law being passed. Authors and other artists are an afterthought.
It puts food on your table in the same way it did for PSY (the "Gangnam Style" guy)... People learn about you, and will pay a premium for almost anything you touch. For example, to see you live, or to speak to you about anything, or to buy your old house or car at substantially more than it's worth. In short, you become a celebrity. That is the intangible value created for yourself, as a reward for the intangible value you create for society. It works in areas like math and research too. Publishing research will get you a better job. Similarly, having your song copied will give you more income, even if it's just a tip - like a waitress, or a street mime.
It's a spectrum of risk - from donations to Kickstarter - and nowhere in there is copyright - a restriction on other people's creative work (to the detriment of everyone, including yourself) - necessary.
I've got to agree that if I created the most watched YouTube video of all time that even I would probably be able to turn that into some cash. But I don't think that's a viable solution to the problem of novelists, etc., being able to earn a living in a world of unfettered copying.
Copyright is not a restriction on anyone's "creative" work. It restricts the right to copy things. (Not that I'm happy with all the details of current copyright law.)
I have to disagree. Copyright prevents re-use and new work.
The novelist wishing to earn a living is also taking a risk being a novelist, just as I take a risk in paying for an education that may not land me a job. I still charge for my time. The novelist can still charge for his or hers. We both must do something useful. If his or her novel is useful "enough" to live on alone - wonderful - but we shouldn't take it for granted that that is necessarily going to be the case, or that something like copyright will help it to be, or that that would even be a good thing (that people can make a living doing something that society wouldn't even naturally value enough to remunerate).
At the same time as all of that is going on, people are going to continue trying to make the best of what's around - and that includes copying.
Most novelists do not earn a living from their creative work and must work a day job to survive. There are rare exceptions, of course, but in general artists do not earn enough from their creative work to pay the bills. This is as true today as it was before the Internet, before electricity, and before copyright laws.
This is true - most do not. But many writers, composers, photographers, etc. do in fact earn a living from creating. I just said that I want to live in a world where this remains possible. If we throw this out along with copyright, we've certainly lost something.
New technology always causes us to lose something. The issue is whether or not we gain more than we lose, and the answer is universally "yes." The combination of PCs and the Internet has made copyrights obsolete, and with that the concept of royalties is obsolete. Yet what we have gained from those technology vastly outweighs what we have lost. Poor students who can barely afford tuition can access textbooks they would otherwise be unable to afford. The concept of "rare" or "out of print" is a thing of the past. One no longer needs to travel long distances to find a library with a copy of some book or photograph.
People who have no idea how to develop a photograph can send copies to their entire family at near-zero cost. Researchers have presented systems that can create accurate 3D maps of cities using photographs published on the Internet.
I would not throw any of the above away just to preserve the ability of a tiny minority of authors, musicians, actors, etc. to live on their royalty payments. I want to be able to read scientific papers without having to spend hours searching bound journals at some library. Creative workers can and will find ways to monetize their abilities in a post-copyright world, and they will have to do so without relying on DRM and without trying to destroy the Internet.
I absolutely agree with you about the importance and wonders of the internet. And you are undoubtedly right that the internet is making copyright, or at least the traditional view of copyright, obsolete. But we have some ability to create the future by influencing the direction of technology, law, and cultural attitudes. And to fail to replace copyright with something else that allows people to make a living through intellectual and creative work will be a grave mistake. Just ditching copyright and embracing unfettered copying while hoping that creative people will somehow figure out how to feed their families will mean that less, much less, gets created, and we will all be poorer for it. So far, no idea has been shown to be viable: voluntary payments do not and will not work, because enough people will not pay; taking your show on the road only works for able-bodied people with certain combinations of talents, and even then only while they are young and without children - when they need a steady income the least. We need new ideas, and new legal frameworks. Just saying that everything should be free leaves us endlessly recycling the creations of the past, created in the days when authors were still getting paid.
"less, much less, gets created, and we will all be poorer for it"
I have seen no evidence of this. In fact, the Internet boom has been one of the most empowering and prosperous times for creators (distinguished from mere distributors) in my memory. (In fact, I don't recall nearly as much quality music 10 years ago.) Furthermore, the alternative model you seek is simply that of time-tested patronage, which has been the default for anything worth doing since the beginning of history. Today we have the possibility of crowd-funding. I have not been given any reasons to expect less art, only more. Netflix, for example (arguably still a mere distributor), is even producing original series for it's own subscription audience. Copyright is part of the present economy, but Netflix would still want new content for it's channel were it not. Subscriptions are just another form of patronage.
I would think the heaps of money PSY made from YouTube royalties, including those from other people's videos that use his song (thanks to ContentID) and iTunes sales (where his song was #1 for many, many weeks) were among the things that put food on his table.
They undoubtedly were. As long as copyright exists, you'd be a fool not to exploit it. At the same time, it has been observed that the proliferation of parodies, remixes, and downloads only added to the revenue and profitability: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121002/11573120572/gangn...
What do you mean "at the same time"? Those derivative works were profitable because of copyright--that's how ContentID works! How would Psy profit from derivative works if he wasn't allowed to actually claim ownership of his original work? Why else would YouTube ever pay him for videos he didn't upload?
You don't seem to have grasped the point: You brought up Psy, but then proceeded to leave out all the evidence contrary to your agenda. The polite word for that is bullshit.
It does if you are smart enough to pursue this value. Money from selling books doesn't have to be your goal. If thousands of people are reading your work and getting value from it you may offer more value that they would, this time, exchange for money.
Just like music stars earn a lot of money from live shows. You may become a speaker, you may sell additional stuff derived from your book (as a freemium modelo for book market). You may sell this fame of yours to sign profitable contracts to future books with a publisher. You may create online courses to offer to those who read your book (if it is a technical one) or try to sell the rights to TV movies if it is literature.
Well, it is hard to create from an hypotetical situation, but I think you got the point.
This sounds nice, but the problem is that the author creates value, the downloaders receive value, but no exchange is made. The idea that the author has to create MORE value to MAYBE be able to participate in an exchange is just a weak argument for people who don't want to admit that an exchange should take place right off that bat, and if not, the downloaders should not receive any value from the author (i.e. don't download and read the book).
> This sounds nice, but the problem is that the author creates value
Ok, so what type of "value" are we talking about here and what determines this value? Is it economic value? The only reliable way to determine economic value is scarcity. If something is abundantly available (like oxygen or sunlight) its value in this regard is exactly zero. Anybody can obtain it and nobody can prevent it from being obtained. So in that regard I don't buy the argument that the artist has created economic value.
They have, however, created intrinsic cultural value. But cultural value is a completely subjective metric. How do we determine this value? Perhaps by counting the number of people who "appreciate" the art by obtaining it, legally or otherwise. But that would suggest that popular art is always more valuable than unpopular art, which we all can probably agree is false.
Starving artists are caught in a catch-22 situation. Until they become popular, their music is essentially worthless. Pirates, by copying and distributing their music for them, are actually adding value to their art. Most starving artists have a hard time giving their music away, let alone selling it, and I've yet to see one budding artist get upset about their music going viral. At what point does the artist stop encouraging the free and open spread of their art and start discouraging it by enforcing copyright law? And would they not be hypocritical by doing so?
>Pirates, by copying and distributing their music for them, are actually adding value to their art.
Except where they don't add value by pirating something they otherwise would have paid for if it wasn't easily available to pirate with hardly any downside risk.
>This sounds nice, but the problem is that the author creates value, the downloaders receive value, but no exchange is made.
That's where you're wrong. An audience is value in and of itself. The trouble most authors have is with leveraging that value. Traditionally they'd handed the keys over to a big publisher and hoped for the best -- a sucker bet if I'd ever seen one. Now that the exclusive power of distribution has been stripped away from traditional publishers there's actually more opportunity than ever for an author to find and derive value from an audience; it just takes more savvy (and less luck).
That's a pretty naive view of the situation. An audience who perhaps doesn't pay for art but does help spread the word about that art is indeed valuable. Perhaps even more valuable than someone who pays for art but tells nobody else about it.
Sorry, but the naive one here is you - a bunch of pirates telling a bunch of other pirates about this awesome new thing they should pirate doesn't really help you, the creator. But by all means, rationalize away.
Also, why does the one who purchases it have to not spread the word and pirates do? Is that how this whole argument works? A paying customer is probably just as likely to inform other paying customers about this purchase he just made. More likely, in my experience.
Look, there is likely a critical mass of piracy that is concurrent to a rise in purchases as something grows in popularity and becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist. I remain unconvinced that the piracy causes it, and isn't just a sign that whatever is being pirated is good and would is gaining awareness and marketshare, but sure, I'll just go ahead and give up on that argument. But if you don't reach that critical mass, which by and large, most don't, then you are just gaining an audience that isn't helping you at all.
Also, just to be clear - I don't view all piracy equal. When I talk about it, I'm primarily talking about game piracy.
This thread started talking about the value that readers provide. People listen to the Beatles partly because people listen to the Beatles. Where's the direct cash payment for that value add?
If musicians aren't going to reward the people that advertise their work then they shouldn't release it in the first place.
"You may become a speaker, you may sell additional stuff derived from your book"
What if I don't want to do that? What if I just want to write books? I can't make a living from that unless I also become a showman or sell some kind of other crap?
"You may sell this fame of yours to sign profitable contracts to future books with a publisher"
But if the publishers can't make any profit because everyone is just love-copying books, they won't be able to offer me any money.
"online courses" "TV movies"
These sound like plausible ideas at first, but the courses and movies could be torrented as easily as the book, so this profit stream dries up as well.
> What if I don't want to do that? What if I just want to write books? I can't make a living from that unless I also become a showman or sell some kind of other crap?
Welcome to the creative industry. The previous copy-protected market guarantees your living in no way. The vast majority of talent is simply fighting obscurity. You're arguing about the results of fame, which is very rare.
> What if I don't want to do that? What if I just want to write books? I can't make a living from that unless I also become a showman or sell some kind of other crap?
If the only alternative is to destroy the free Internet and our computing freedom, then yes. I'm sorry.
I think it's quite uncommon to have a commercial product that is widely pirated but not widely sold. It's always going to be roughly the same proportions of sales-to-pirates for your product. if you had thousands of copies downloaded but only a handful of copies sold, it probably means it wasn't a very popular book, and wouldn't have sold well regardless of piracy or not. If pirating didn't exist, your sales numbers might not change much because the benefits of no piracy (payment being the only option) somewhat cancels out the benefits of piracy (widespread knowledge of your product).
I'm not condoning piracy, but the effects of it are complex. I'd rather replace it with a friendlier approach, like Bandcamp's pay-what-you-want options.
I don't have any citations. It's not a hard rule and doesn't apply everywhere, but I feel like it would be somewhat applicable in this situation. It's just a thing that I've concluded as a result of my own experiences with selling digital media (games and music). Piracy did indeed spread awareness of my music and game, although it's hard to say if caused any lost revenue.
I supposed some fraction of pirates would have instead paid for the media had they not been able to pirate it, but there would also be a fraction of paying customers who would not have heard about the media had their peers not pirated it. It's hard to tell if these two populations are roughly equal in size, but I have a hunch that the second group is larger. This is based on our sales data following our involvement in the Humble Bundle: http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures
If you look at the third chart, you can see that after the Humble Bundle spikes, the blue line starts to have an upward slope, whereas it was almost flat before. This indicates that sales on Steam increased after the Bundle finished, due to the huge influx of new players (many who only paid a penny). It seems that the more people playing the game, the more copies you will sell, because more awareness is raised. There are a lot of factors involved in that that don't let me conclusively say that this effect extends to pirates too, but it seems reasonable. Since I can't do anything about piracy, I don't let it bother me too much and just focus on making things worth buying. It's just a part of the business, so it's factored into it all.
It create the same value as a kid going to class, sharing a bag of sweet or fruits with the others in the class. Except, the bag is a star trek replicator. The act itself produce community, and community create society, and functioning society is a requirement for a even basic standard of living.
Denying people access to knowledge, culture and useful information on the single basis of money is in my view wrong. Why should we let poor farmers die of famine by denying them access to knowledge that cost us nothing to give? Why should only children from rich families be able to access culture and become great artists?
To quote professor Eben Moglen: The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?
I think that's totally awesome in theory. In practice, I can give away all of the software, music, and artwork that I create, because we have "replicators" for it, but it seems that Honda can't replicate me a car and the local contracting company can't replicate me a house.
Don't misunderstand me. I really want to give away everything I create for free. I think that would be wonderful. But until and unless the parties that create what I want and need are willing and able to do the same, it kind of puts me in an awkward position.
I guess one solution is to work for pay only on things that aren't copyable yet, and consider all things that are copyable to be, by default, of zero monetary value, and if made at all, then made as a charitable gift to society. Is that a good path? (Really asking, not a trick question.)
>I guess one solution is to work for pay only on things that aren't copyable yet, and consider all things that are copyable to be, by default, of zero monetary value, and if made at all, then made as a charitable gift to society. Is that a good path?
This is a really good question and it's been in the back of my head for years. I think reality might force it to be the only tenable position, although one important piece you're missing is the willingness for people to pay you even if they don't have to. I think people recognize that there is value in your product, even if they aren't required to pay for your product to receive it. Many won't, but some will voluntarily pay you to compensate you for the value they received.
Advertising is another option.
The end result I see is we give up the massive budget productions (AAA movies), and instead receive creative works created by passionate individuals who want to spend their free time (youtube). If I had to choose between that result and destroying Internet and computing freedom, I think I would pick giving up massive productions.
I don't know. It's an interesting question, thanks for bringing it up.
Its one way to do it, and I wouldn't mind giving a free beer to those that do when I meet them.
Personally, I think there are many ways as a creative person can do to lower or even remove potential harm from copyright. For example, if I were to ask what part of my projects would be potential important for a kid trying to learn, I should be able to identify where copyright might be better removed than enforced. Until society figures out a way to not prevent children and starving people access to knowledge, all I can do is to realize when my work might prevent rather enable and then act. Depending on what ones work is, that can either be very easy thing to follow, or very hard. I hope its not hard, but if it is, I wish you luck :).
In addition to the other answers, don't forget that in the situation described, if you remove the 'thousands of unauthorized copies', you still haven't sold any copies.
In terms of semantics: "Say I write a book but nobody purchases a copy."
In more meaningful terms: If people do not value your book highly enough to pay you for it, then without the thousands of unauthorized copies, you are an unknown writer languishing in obscurity. With the copies, you have at least started to publicise your name and your message.
"If people do not value your book highly enough to pay you for it"
But the crux of the matter is that people will, in overwhelming numbers, choose not to pay if they are not compelled to pay, even if they value the content. If you eliminate the thousands of unauthorized copies, it is not true that I still haven't sold any copies. I would perhaps have several hundred sales. I might prefer the several thousand free downloads, but I should have that choice.
Look at the "Pioneer One" example brought up in another comment. Four million downloads and a mere $20,000 raised. People feel entitled to free stuff; no matter how great they think it is, if they can get away with letting others pay, they will. All the "fans", and they refused to kick in one dollar for the content that they value so highly.
I think the poster boys for pay what you want, Radiohead and NIN, don't think this model is a good idea anymore because of exactly what is mentioned above: people want too much free stuff if they can get it and that isn't sustainable.
You're right about the $100,000: I skimmed too quickly. So, 29 cents per download for the ones we know about; the actual number of downloads is probably much greater, as pointed out in the article. And, still not nearly enough to provide livelihoods for the people involved in the project, so my point remains.
"your argument seems to hinge on the idea that they would make more money if they could."
My argument is just that they absolutely need to make much more money if they are to make a living making TV shows, as other people do, and that voluntary donations aren't cutting it, because people don't pay when they are not compelled to. So this case, which was adduced as a counterexample, helps to prove my point.
The more likely scenario is that you will write a book and nobody will purchase a copy nor download one from torrent sites. Until you've become popular, your work is essentially worthless. You are validated by your appreciators.
Quite an uncommon situation as far as I have seen. Can you actually provide an example of a book (or anything else) that nobody bought, but that was heavily pirated?
The same way all that "value" you might get from a loving family, good friends, good weather and high self-esteem. Things have value even if they don't have a $ price attached.
