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I'd happily sacrifice all of Hollywood so that computers and the internet can remain free. It wouldn't just be all of Hollywood, but even if it were, who are y

I'd happily sacrifice all of Hollywood so that computers and the internet can remain free. It wouldn't just be all of Hollywood, but even if it were, who are you to make that decision for the millions of people who enjoy the creative work Hollywood produces? The rest of your argument is a straw man. It is illegal for me to drive my car at 100mph past a school, but my car doesn't have any physical means of stopping me. As a society we have agreed that this is a reasonable rule and codified it in law so everyone knows the consensus, and almost everyone complied voluntarily, and those who break the rule are penalised for it. The strange thing about copyright is that it remains mostly a civil matter, which leaves the burden of enforcement on the victim of copyright infringement and so makes enforcement of small infringements prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, a police officer can and will arrest a 15-year-old who walks into a corner shop and gets caught stealing a chocolate bar. That anomaly in turn then leads to attempts to make enforcement of small infringements on a wide scale more viable, which gets you far from ideal solutions like the DMCA and its counterparts around the world.

2J0 7y ago
I’m no longer in the field since this was written, but there was certainly a huge move towards criminal treatment of what should be wholly civil copyright law: https://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/06/over-criminalizing-copyright.html?m=1 https://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/06/over-criminalizing...
bb88 7y ago
It's not just hollywood, it's all creators. Technical Publishers, software companies, etc. While I agree that software freedom is important, I would argue that freedom itself is important -- and that means being able to choose the license for a creative work. That is unless you believe that everything should be locked in walled garden hell....
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  You are redefining freedom to mean the freedom to take away others freedom. If you have laid claim to the number 010101 and on my device a chunk of memory is initialized to 000000 you are defining your freedom as the power to keep me from changing that memory to 010101 this only sounds sane when you use language that presupposed we accept this insanity.
michaelmrose 7y ago
> It wouldn't just be all of Hollywood, but even if it were, who are you to make that decision for the millions of people who enjoy the creative work Hollywood produces? Decisions such as that are made either by a substantial portion of the citizens by vote or by voting for elected reps who directly enact them. You knew that of course. We are speaking of what we respectively think OUGHT to be with no power to implement ourselves. > The rest of your argument is a straw man. It is illegal for me to drive my car at 100mph past a school, but my car doesn't have any physical means of stopping me. As a society we have agreed that this is a reasonable rule and codified it in law so everyone knows the consensus, and almost everyone complied voluntarily, and those who break the rule are penalised for it. Piracy is incredibly trivial by virtue of happening directly between distributing computer and receiving computer with indirection and encryption of communications trivially implementable. The present status quo is so lazy just because so little work is required to get around current levels of restrictions. Pay for a vpn which comes with a cute GUI app with a button that says "secure your connection" use a search engine to find things you would like to watch or read. The current balance of value and convenience is in fact directly related to the knowledge that if you make it too inconvenient or expensive people will literally just turn around and download it. You propose enforcement to remedy this. > Meanwhile, a police officer can and will arrest a 15-year-old who walks into a corner shop and gets caught stealing a chocolate bar. Actually you could probably meet your caloric needs for the next month off stolen chocolate bars and have very little chance of being apprehended and literally zero chance of being prosecuted. In theory if a cop happened by during a theft they might arrest someone stealing hundreds to thousands of dollars in goods after which the courts would be extremely apt to drop the ball. In most cases people stealing goods in a non violent fashion is too low a priority to allocate resources to even when the thieves are stealing thousands in public and prosecution and incarceration would be straightforward if not cheap. Compare the ease of catching a shoplifter acting illicitly in a controlled space to catching people downloading movies and books on their computers! With half a whit of effort inspired by actual enforcement it would be incredibly trivial to make catching downloading as hard as catching terrorists except for the minor matter than 230 billion acts of terrorism aren't happening annually. Worse great sophistication isn't required by all users just the tiny number that produce tools to allow others to benefit. This can be bundled into an easy to install piece of software to run on your own machine or on a cheap 25 dollar single board computer. What other poster gets that you do not is that without access to people's computers that supersedes their own you can't with any reasonable or affordable degree of effort keep them from downloading numbers you think you own. It's an arms race you literally can't possibly win. Even communist China can't 100% control the media their people view and they can disappear citizens in the night. This is the end game of drm and trusted computing to develop a controllable platform which can be made to serve the interests of government and industry. This is now many devices in fact already work now. The cure is most assuredly worse than the disease. > That anomaly in turn then leads to attempts to make enforcement of small infringements on a wide scale more viable, which gets you far from ideal solutions like the DMCA and its counterparts around the world. It's not anomalous that something that has never been a criminal act isn't treated as such. It's not shocking that the state wont take up an impossible burden in behalf of a small number of private benefactors to the detriment of society. Making it slightly harder to pirate and very easy to stream is a smart compromise that has been mostly working to generate billions of dollars. It's politically impossible to implement 1984 to maximize the revenue of game of thrones and lesser measures are doomed to failure. In fact if you start pulling that thread and throwing Suzy homemaker in jail because little Tommy downloaded movies or stealing her grocery money to pay fines as you become increasingly effective you are apt to become increasingly likely to push for copyright reform that is likely to harm future revenue in a way that little Tommy can't possibly do. If I was the copyright industry I would enjoy what I have.

2J0 7y ago

I’m no longer in the field since this was written, but there was certainly a huge move towards criminal treatment of what should be wholly civil copyright law: https://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/06/over-criminalizing-copyright.html?m=1 https://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/06/over-criminalizing...

bb88 7y ago

It's not just hollywood, it's all creators. Technical Publishers, software companies, etc. While I agree that software freedom is important, I would argue that freedom itself is important -- and that means being able to choose the license for a creative work. That is unless you believe that everything should be locked in walled garden hell....

michaelmrose 7y ago
You are redefining freedom to mean the freedom to take away others freedom. If you have laid claim to the number 010101 and on my device a chunk of memory is initialized to 000000 you are defining your freedom as the power to keep me from changing that memory to 010101 this only sounds sane when you use language that presupposed we accept this insanity.

michaelmrose 7y ago

> It wouldn't just be all of Hollywood, but even if it were, who are you to make that decision for the millions of people who enjoy the creative work Hollywood produces? Decisions such as that are made either by a substantial portion of the citizens by vote or by voting for elected reps who directly enact them. You knew that of course. We are speaking of what we respectively think OUGHT to be with no power to implement ourselves. > The rest of your argument is a straw man. It is illegal for me to drive my car at 100mph past a school, but my car doesn't have any physical means of stopping me. As a society we have agreed that this is a reasonable rule and codified it in law so everyone knows the consensus, and almost everyone complied voluntarily, and those who break the rule are penalised for it. Piracy is incredibly trivial by virtue of happening directly between distributing computer and receiving computer with indirection and encryption of communications trivially implementable. The present status quo is so lazy just because so little work is required to get around current levels of restrictions. Pay for a vpn which comes with a cute GUI app with a button that says "secure your connection" use a search engine to find things you would like to watch or read. The current balance of value and convenience is in fact directly related to the knowledge that if you make it too inconvenient or expensive people will literally just turn around and download it. You propose enforcement to remedy this. > Meanwhile, a police officer can and will arrest a 15-year-old who walks into a corner shop and gets caught stealing a chocolate bar. Actually you could probably meet your caloric needs for the next month off stolen chocolate bars and have very little chance of being apprehended and literally zero chance of being prosecuted. In theory if a cop happened by during a theft they might arrest someone stealing hundreds to thousands of dollars in goods after which the courts would be extremely apt to drop the ball. In most cases people stealing goods in a non violent fashion is too low a priority to allocate resources to even when the thieves are stealing thousands in public and prosecution and incarceration would be straightforward if not cheap. Compare the ease of catching a shoplifter acting illicitly in a controlled space to catching people downloading movies and books on their computers! With half a whit of effort inspired by actual enforcement it would be incredibly trivial to make catching downloading as hard as catching terrorists except for the minor matter than 230 billion acts of terrorism aren't happening annually. Worse great sophistication isn't required by all users just the tiny number that produce tools to allow others to benefit. This can be bundled into an easy to install piece of software to run on your own machine or on a cheap 25 dollar single board computer. What other poster gets that you do not is that without access to people's computers that supersedes their own you can't with any reasonable or affordable degree of effort keep them from downloading numbers you think you own. It's an arms race you literally can't possibly win. Even communist China can't 100% control the media their people view and they can disappear citizens in the night. This is the end game of drm and trusted computing to develop a controllable platform which can be made to serve the interests of government and industry. This is now many devices in fact already work now. The cure is most assuredly worse than the disease. > That anomaly in turn then leads to attempts to make enforcement of small infringements on a wide scale more viable, which gets you far from ideal solutions like the DMCA and its counterparts around the world. It's not anomalous that something that has never been a criminal act isn't treated as such. It's not shocking that the state wont take up an impossible burden in behalf of a small number of private benefactors to the detriment of society. Making it slightly harder to pirate and very easy to stream is a smart compromise that has been mostly working to generate billions of dollars. It's politically impossible to implement 1984 to maximize the revenue of game of thrones and lesser measures are doomed to failure. In fact if you start pulling that thread and throwing Suzy homemaker in jail because little Tommy downloaded movies or stealing her grocery money to pay fines as you become increasingly effective you are apt to become increasingly likely to push for copyright reform that is likely to harm future revenue in a way that little Tommy can't possibly do. If I was the copyright industry I would enjoy what I have.