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Copyright Infringement and Theft – The Difference

• georgieporgie 15y ago
  I don't understand the defense of piracy when we're transforming into an information-based economy. It seems like we're setting ourselves up for massive failure in the not-so-distant future.
  • w1ntermute 15y ago
    Piracy is inevitable. Even if you crack down on file-sharing networks, people will find ways to get what they want for free from people they know, and in this day and age, it won't take long for the content to spread either way. The key to beating piracy is to provide services that can't be pirated or are significantly better than the pirated alternative in some tangible way.
    • petegrif 15y ago
      Piracy is not inevitable. There are products - like google search - that can be successfully managed as a trade secret. Search is a server side functionality and it can be closely held so in that case and others like it, it works. Your solution for 'beating piracy' for those cases where copying is inevitable makes perfect sense - IF a) you restrict innovation to 'services that can't be pirated' - but is that in society's interest? and b) your innovation can't be improved upon by someone who has the benefit of studying your product, has no technical debt and has incurred no R&D cost in getting to the point you took the product. That is a pretty demanding standard. (btw - like your handle - inspired by W Gibson unless I am much mistaken)
      • w1ntermute 15y ago
        > There are products - like google search - that can be successfully managed as a trade secret. Search is a server side functionality and it can be closely held so in that case and others like it, it works. Google Search is product that falls into the "can't be pirated" category that I previously mentioned.
    • georgieporgie 15y ago
      I regularly hear things like that. "Piracy is inevitable." "Data wants to be free." These seem like pointless platitudes, said only to rationalize behavior. Traffic accidents are inevitable. Murder is inevitable. Some portion of the population will always end doing harm to other parts. Does this mean we accept it and allow it to flourish? Or do we decide to instill in people the desire and ability to minimize behaviors which lead to suffering and economic loss?
      • Natsu 15y ago
        Many people believe that the harm is vastly overstated. Comparison infringement to things that kill people don't help you, even if that wasn't the main point. We had the Renaissance without copyright laws. There are other ways to help artists, putting an end to Hollywood accounting, for example.
        • georgieporgie 15y ago
          Many people believe that the harm is vastly overstated. I agree that, specifically, music and movie estimates are ridiculously overstated. However, we have no means of measuring the total, fundamental economic losses due to a culture which no longer values intangible things. Assuming you're a software engineer, do you want to proceed into a world where people shell out thousands of dollars for an iPhone, but scoff at paying $1 for software you've worked hard on? Current (and presumably future) attitudes toward (intangible) IP are dangerous to the economy we're developing. Comparison infringement to things that kill people don't help you, even if that wasn't the main point. Okay, substitute something non-lethal. People send their kids to school even when the kids are sick. This is bad for everyone. Do we just accept it, or do we remind people to keep their kids at home when they're sick? If you want more analogies, I'm sure I can come up with them, but I would prefer to simply have the question answered with regards to giving up on IP enforcement.
          • Natsu 15y ago
            I believe that the best way to maximize the societal value of software is for it to be FOSS, actually, and release what I can accordingly. Finding ways to make money off of that is another matter. There are many things one can do: charge for support/customization, find patrons/sponsors who benefit from your work to fund it, etc. I don't believe that copyright laws are a good way to fund innovation. And I believe there are a lot of alternate business models that remain unexplored. Every law has a cost to enforce it. Many worry that the costs (both monetary costs and reduced freedoms) are ever-increasing while the benefit is static, and mostly going to middle-men. After all, I don't believe that the RIAA shares the proceeds of the infringement lawsuits with the artists (feel free to correct me if you can prove that belief wrong). Rather than trying to make this law work, I think we should look to successful businessman/artists for the way forward. Web comic authors in particular have done rather well for themselves, in spite of giving pretty much everything away for free. For example, if you want the website of one particularly business-savvy author (who has a lot of good advice for anyone trying this), look no further than here: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ He's done very clever crowd-sourcing (he gets fans to help him ship books), has partnered with fans who make cool merchandise to sell it (rather than shutting them down over trademarks), and does a lot of other things to make his products more compelling than the piracy option. Howard was a business manager before starting that webcomic and I've learned more by watching what he does than I've found in most articles.
  • swombat 15y ago
    In order to re-engineer the internet in such a way as to stop piracy, we'd have to give up what made it work: its decentralisation, its chaos, its freedom. Record companies think a measly $12bn a year is worth giving up all that. Some of us don't.
    • georgieporgie 15y ago
      Social engineering doesn't require changes to the Internet. Edit: educating people about the ethical and economic implications of piracy does not require any change to the Internet.
      • akkartik 15y ago
        I don't understand what you mean, or even if you're agreeing or disagreeing with swombat. Edit: yeah giving people information doesn't have the connotations as 'social engineering'.
        • georgieporgie 15y ago
          Well, I was thinking more of a more deliberate, calculated method of instilling values into young people. Social engineering in the sociology sense. But you're right, it was a bit dumb to use the phrase here, as it's probably thought of in the Kevin Mitnick sense.
      • hxa7241 15y ago
        How about educating these corporations about changing business models to suit changed circumstances? The economic -- i.e. overall -- effects of piracy are quite likely good for the public.
      • Natsu 15y ago
        "Don't Copy that Floppy" was an utter failure. Many people object to copyright as unethical according to their personal ethics. The behavior of the RIAA & MPAA has not helped them convince anyone, either.
  • hxa7241 15y ago
    You are not thinking of the harmful effects of copyright. The mechanism of copyright, by definition, is to restrict the flow of information. This is exactly what you do not want in an information economy. First, because the cost of that restriction is effectively magnified. When information was in paper books, it was difficult to copy. Copyright restricted copies, but since people could not make copies it did not make much difference. But now information is digital the cost of copying is practically zero. That means the restrictions of copyright stops people realising a large benefit that would otherwise be available. Second, the most vital ingredient in production of new information seems most likely not extra monetary incentive, but other information. And the fact that information is infinitely copyable amplifies its value. A single amount of money can pay for only one piece of information production. But a single amount of information can contribute, through copies, to an unlimited number of pieces of information production. This is the funny thing. Copyright really only works with products that are substantially non-abstract, non-informational. When you have an economy that really is all informational, copyright does not actually make sense: its intrinsic contradiction just becomes too self-destructive.
    • georgieporgie 15y ago
      The mechanism of copyright, by definition, is to restrict the flow of information. This is exactly what you do not want in an information economy. Where do you propose that money changes hands in an information-based economy where information is freely copied?
      • serichsen 15y ago
        You would pay not for copying but for creation. A software developer would be paid for solving new problems or customizing known solutions to them. Pretending to "sell" shrinkwrapped information is stupid nonsense.
        • georgieporgie 15y ago
          One of the great things about software development is that -- theoretically -- you can do a large amount of work up-front, then receive somewhat passive income by selling that creation. It seems to me that removing that interesting feature of software moves developers closer to what I generally hear described as serfdom, "wage slave", etc. Pretending to "sell" shrinkwrapped information is stupid nonsense. Care to elaborate?
  • jamesgagan 15y ago
    What part of the linked article defends piracy?
• tzs 15y ago
  That was a pointless article. The author fails to understand that words are used with different meanings in English and law. For example, if you came home from work and found that your house had been cleaned out by thieves, you might say "I've been robbed!". If you did so in the presence of the author, would he correct you, pointing out that you were in fact burglarized, not robbed? Probably not--in normal conversational English people will use robbed more expansively than it is used in the law. In common usage, people use "theft" and related terms like "stole" to mean the exercise of a right that should belong to someone else, with everything interpreted expansively. For instance, we might speak of someone "stealing" another person's girlfriend. Obviously, he did not legally steal her, but there are social norms concerning what is acceptable behavior in relationships and toward people in relationships, and so if someone violates those norms in order to effect a retargeting of the girls affections, we'll say she was stolen. Even farther afield, we have things like actors who steal the show, players who steal the game, and so on. Getting back to copyright infringement, copyright law is purposefully modeled on the law of physical property, in order to artificially give intellectual goods legal status similar to that of physical goods, so that the same kind of markets that work for physical goods can be used for intellectual goods. It essentially creates a homomorphism from the world of intellectual goods to the world of physical goods. Under that homomorphism, the operation of "copyright infringement" in the world of intellectual goods maps to the operation of "theft" or "stealing" in the world of physical goods.
  • Natsu 15y ago
    They understand all that just fine. They're disagreeing with that usage and just listed a bunch of reasons why it doesn't make sense.
    • tzs 15y ago
      No, the article is about how it is not legally theft.
      • Natsu 15y ago
        Which is their argument about why it shouldn't be called theft informally, either. If there was an article about why people shouldn't call monitors "the CPU" that went into detail about what a central processing unit was and why techs call it that, would you accuse the tech who was trying to explain what a CPU is of being confused about informal usage?
• jwatte 15y ago
  Copyright infringement is not theft from the people being copied, but theft from the cheaper alternatives finding no traction. If my choice of entertainment is "the best in the world, for free" or "some aspiring entertainer, for five bucks" then the choice is easy: best in the world! free! If my choice of entertainment is "the best in the world, for $20" or "some aspiring entertainer, for $5," then some people will choose to pay for the best experience, and some people will choose to get the aspiring entertainer for cheap. Copyright infringement in the form of piracy really serves to cement the position of the already top-of-the-chart, and make it a lot harder for any alternatives to make a living. Compare word processors: Apart from the libre-software fringe, why are there no wide-spread word processors beside Word? If Word is coke, why is there no Pepsi, or Snapple for word processing? (The "move to the cloud" and "software as a service" movement is beside this point -- that's a change in "what it is" at a more fundamental level)