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> [...] such laws, as the author of the subject article accurately points out, would never fly in the non-internet realm. The logical conclusion is that the no

by praptak 16y ago

> [...] such laws, as the author of the subject article accurately points out, would never fly in the non-internet realm. The logical conclusion is that the non-internet realm is actually enough to make copyright unenforcible.Suppose the internet has been shut down. I can still hand my neighbor a USB stick. I can still snail-mail my buddy an external drive. The intellectual "property" lobby knows that. That's why they wanted to push something as ridiculous as the SSSCA. For those too young to remember, here's the gist of it: "It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies" More here: http://xenon.stanford.edu/~ruchika/dmca/theFairyTaleGetsWorse.html http://xenon.stanford.edu/~ruchika/dmca/theFairyTaleGetsWors...

bigiain 16y ago
"Suppose the internet has been shut down. I can still hand my neighbor a USB stick. I can still snail-mail my buddy an external drive." As I see things, there's an important difference there. Just like home taping didn't kill the record industry, and videotapes didn't kill the tv/movie industry, sharing usb sticks or hard drives with your circle of friends isn't going to kill any creative industry either. As is common with computers, the sheer difference in scale of digitally sharing over the internet _does_ make a difference. With physically sharing storage media, there's a small but not zero marginal cost each time you share something. A few bucks worth of usb stick or a few tens of dollars worth of hard drive, which you no longer have use of while your friends has it or it's in transit. That's going to practically limit the sphere of your sharing - think about your own social graph, how many of your "facebook friends" would you actually send a drive full of tunes or movies to? I know the subset of my friendlist that I'd go to the trouble to send a few bucks worth of usb stick is a reasonably small portion of the people that Facebook calls "my friends". That's a _very_ different thing to what happens when you dump your entire media collection into the /torrent directory on your always-on campus network connected machine. The internet enables zero marginal cost sharing, which inevitably leads to orders of magnitude wider sharing. I suspect the Dunbar number of ~150 real social connections is the very top end of what most people would consider to be a sensible sized physical-media-sharing-network, and realistically most people would probably stop short at 10 or 15 individuals you'd expend the effort to share with if sharing required you to actually send real-but-small-cost atoms to do it. (curiously, or perhaps obviously, these suspicions about sharing network sizes closely map my personal experience ~30 years ago with sharing compact cassettes and vinyl LPs in highschool in the early/mid '80s. There were 6 or 8 people who I'd lend/borrow LPs between, and perhaps a dozen more that I'd lend or copy tapes for.)
- zinkem 16y ago
  The record industry rose up to solve a problem: artists needed their music recorded and distributed. Those problems are solved by computers and the internet. It's so cheap to record an album these days its ridiculous, as opposed to 40 years ago when you needed half a million dollars just for a tape machine. The overhead to make music has gone down, and so should the price to listen to it.
- Natsu 16y ago
  > Just like home taping didn't kill the record industry, and videotapes didn't kill the tv/movie industry, sharing usb sticks or hard drives with your circle of friends isn't going to kill any creative industry either. I don't believe the internet has yet killed them, either, nor do I think it likely to. Jack Valenti once said that the VCR was like the "Boston strangler" even though they got so much money from tapes back in the day and even more from DVDs and BDs today.
- nitrogen 16y ago
  Certainly one individual will only share with a few of his/her friends, but those friends probably have other friends, etc. After all, we're only six circles of friends away from just about any other person on the planet. With torrenting, the same total numbers of people may be sharing, just in a larger group at once.

by praptak 16y ago

bigiain 16y ago

"Suppose the internet has been shut down. I can still hand my neighbor a USB stick. I can still snail-mail my buddy an external drive." As I see things, there's an important difference there. Just like home taping didn't kill the record industry, and videotapes didn't kill the tv/movie industry, sharing usb sticks or hard drives with your circle of friends isn't going to kill any creative industry either. As is common with computers, the sheer difference in scale of digitally sharing over the internet _does_ make a difference. With physically sharing storage media, there's a small but not zero marginal cost each time you share something. A few bucks worth of usb stick or a few tens of dollars worth of hard drive, which you no longer have use of while your friends has it or it's in transit. That's going to practically limit the sphere of your sharing - think about your own social graph, how many of your "facebook friends" would you actually send a drive full of tunes or movies to? I know the subset of my friendlist that I'd go to the trouble to send a few bucks worth of usb stick is a reasonably small portion of the people that Facebook calls "my friends". That's a _very_ different thing to what happens when you dump your entire media collection into the /torrent directory on your always-on campus network connected machine. The internet enables zero marginal cost sharing, which inevitably leads to orders of magnitude wider sharing. I suspect the Dunbar number of ~150 real social connections is the very top end of what most people would consider to be a sensible sized physical-media-sharing-network, and realistically most people would probably stop short at 10 or 15 individuals you'd expend the effort to share with if sharing required you to actually send real-but-small-cost atoms to do it. (curiously, or perhaps obviously, these suspicions about sharing network sizes closely map my personal experience ~30 years ago with sharing compact cassettes and vinyl LPs in highschool in the early/mid '80s. There were 6 or 8 people who I'd lend/borrow LPs between, and perhaps a dozen more that I'd lend or copy tapes for.)

zinkem 16y ago
The record industry rose up to solve a problem: artists needed their music recorded and distributed. Those problems are solved by computers and the internet. It's so cheap to record an album these days its ridiculous, as opposed to 40 years ago when you needed half a million dollars just for a tape machine. The overhead to make music has gone down, and so should the price to listen to it.
Natsu 16y ago
> Just like home taping didn't kill the record industry, and videotapes didn't kill the tv/movie industry, sharing usb sticks or hard drives with your circle of friends isn't going to kill any creative industry either. I don't believe the internet has yet killed them, either, nor do I think it likely to. Jack Valenti once said that the VCR was like the "Boston strangler" even though they got so much money from tapes back in the day and even more from DVDs and BDs today.
nitrogen 16y ago
Certainly one individual will only share with a few of his/her friends, but those friends probably have other friends, etc. After all, we're only six circles of friends away from just about any other person on the planet. With torrenting, the same total numbers of people may be sharing, just in a larger group at once.