6 ms·

"our side" is the pro-freedom, pro-copying, information-wants-to-be-free, consumer side. "their side" is the pro-restriction, pro-enforcement, pro-1984 content

"our side" is the pro-freedom, pro-copying, information-wants-to-be-free, consumer side. "their side" is the pro-restriction, pro-enforcement, pro-1984 content producer side. > I support that side as little as I support SOPA-like bills. Theire is no "undecided" side. Either you support copyright enforcement against people who want to freely share information without a north-korea-style censorship body over their shoulders, or you dont. There is no middle ground. You cant support "a little bit" of censorship.

gphil 14y ago
I don't agree. There is plenty of middle ground, and I think most people tend to fall around the center of the spectrum. I for one don't support SOPA, yet support the notion of copyright.
- freshhawk 14y ago
  The middle ground is imaginary. For the types of copyright infringement everyone is probably thinking of (music, audiobooks, music videos, tv shows, movies, books) that are easy to turn into bits there is only one possible way to enforce copyright and that is large scale surveillance of the internet in order to police the content. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see much middle ground. Not when you think it all the way through to taking actual action to protect copyrighted works. Besides SOPA style surveillance systems how do you enforce the notion of copyright that you support? It's too late to try and use social norms and make it uncool or embarrassing to have downloaded something without paying the creator. People will share things if they can unless someone stops them. No one who isn't a strawman supports "unlimited copyright infringement" or doesn't want the artists we love to get paid, they just understand the tradeoffs that would have to be made to keep enforcing our current (historically recent) copyright system in the modern age and don't feel that abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy in order to temporarily protect the business models of those who currently pay artists is a worthwhile tradeoff.
  - nilsbunger 14y ago
    People still pay for movies, music, and SW today, so our current balance still creates economic rewards for production, despite piracy. Would you call our society today a "SOPA-style surveillance system" ?
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      Not at all, although I would argue that our current system today is in serious transition. Sharing is getting easier and more distributed, that's what's prompting the SOPA style solutions. Staying where we are now isn't an option thanks to the HN crowd continuously working on new ways to connect and share bits with their social circles.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    The middle ground is certainly not imaginary. Life is not black or white. The people I associate with don't share things, because they almost universally recognize that if people don't financially support movie studios/music studios/authors - that this incredible flow of high quality content we all enjoy will disappear, almost overnight. The right approach to managing copyright infringement is to continue to pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) while continuing to make that same content available through non-drm, inexpensive sources. I applaud google's approach - which is to make it increasingly difficult to find these sites which persistently make copyright-infringing material available. Hopefully the other major search engines will do so as well; though, last time I checked, DuckDuckGo got a significant portion of it's content through Yahoo BOSS, and Yahoo get's it's content through Bing - so, in theory, if Bing adopts the same copyright friendly search indicators, then 90%+ of the search engines will now be obscuring this material)
    - harshreality 14y ago
      Everyone is a publisher. You're in favor of lawsuits against people who run bittorrent clients in a swarm, then, for $22k a song, or even $1000 per song? Any amount enough to be worthwhile as a deterrent is punitive and has the potential to wreck someone's life. Or what about blogs or forums with posted links to copyrighted material on filehosting sites?
nilsbunger 14y ago
Many of us derive our (high) salaries from building software that isn't open-sourced. Copyright is one important layer to prevent the SW from being used for free by everyone. Even Google does this - it never open-sourced its core search infrastructure or google docs/mail/maps/etc products, and it monetizes them. And its open source products like chrome and android are really about creating more "attach" to its proprietary products. Do those who hold the "pro-copying" view believe it's somehow bad that our work (software IP) results in proprietary source code that we are paid for? Or is SW somehow different from someone who spends a lot to create a movie, book or song? I'm honestly curious! (Personally, I'm against SOPA, and skeptical of SW patents, but don't have a problem with copyright).
- benologist 14y ago
  What we do is different because our work is automagically protected from everything that threatens other forms of IP. And yet it's not at all hypocritical to play fast and easy with everyone else's IP!
forrestthewoods 14y ago
Haha. Well in that case no I strongly do not support what you so generously call "our side". But thanks for throwing my hat into your ring. I support environments that enable and encourage the production of new creative works. I believe that copyright in some form is necessary to support such a system. "A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." - Posner, 1989, An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law
- freshhawk 14y ago
  > I support environments that enable and encourage the production of new creative works And when something comes along that makes it so easy to share/steal those creative works? What do you do to it? It easy to say "I support free speech and the internet", "I don't support government surveillance of it's citizens" and "environments that enable and encourage the production of new creative works" because saying those things is meaningless. Where do you stand when those things come in conflict with each other and tradeoffs need to be made?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- hxa7241 14y ago
waterlesscloud 14y ago
If you attempt to force me into a binary decision like that, you aren't going to like what I decide.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
Your mixing a lot of different things. I support copyright but don't support SOPA. I'm pro-consumer and freedom but believe content creators (software, music, film etc.) should be allowed to protect their content (to a certain point). There is a big difference between a free exchange of information and wanting everything available to you for free with no restrictions. And copyright != censorship. North Korea's big problem isn't copyright enforcement. Drawing a comparison between North Korea and people who support copyright is a stupid exaggeration.

gphil 14y ago

I don't agree. There is plenty of middle ground, and I think most people tend to fall around the center of the spectrum. I for one don't support SOPA, yet support the notion of copyright.

freshhawk 14y ago
The middle ground is imaginary. For the types of copyright infringement everyone is probably thinking of (music, audiobooks, music videos, tv shows, movies, books) that are easy to turn into bits there is only one possible way to enforce copyright and that is large scale surveillance of the internet in order to police the content. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see much middle ground. Not when you think it all the way through to taking actual action to protect copyrighted works. Besides SOPA style surveillance systems how do you enforce the notion of copyright that you support? It's too late to try and use social norms and make it uncool or embarrassing to have downloaded something without paying the creator. People will share things if they can unless someone stops them. No one who isn't a strawman supports "unlimited copyright infringement" or doesn't want the artists we love to get paid, they just understand the tradeoffs that would have to be made to keep enforcing our current (historically recent) copyright system in the modern age and don't feel that abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy in order to temporarily protect the business models of those who currently pay artists is a worthwhile tradeoff.
- nilsbunger 14y ago
  People still pay for movies, music, and SW today, so our current balance still creates economic rewards for production, despite piracy. Would you call our society today a "SOPA-style surveillance system" ?
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    Not at all, although I would argue that our current system today is in serious transition. Sharing is getting easier and more distributed, that's what's prompting the SOPA style solutions. Staying where we are now isn't an option thanks to the HN crowd continuously working on new ways to connect and share bits with their social circles.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  The middle ground is certainly not imaginary. Life is not black or white. The people I associate with don't share things, because they almost universally recognize that if people don't financially support movie studios/music studios/authors - that this incredible flow of high quality content we all enjoy will disappear, almost overnight. The right approach to managing copyright infringement is to continue to pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) while continuing to make that same content available through non-drm, inexpensive sources. I applaud google's approach - which is to make it increasingly difficult to find these sites which persistently make copyright-infringing material available. Hopefully the other major search engines will do so as well; though, last time I checked, DuckDuckGo got a significant portion of it's content through Yahoo BOSS, and Yahoo get's it's content through Bing - so, in theory, if Bing adopts the same copyright friendly search indicators, then 90%+ of the search engines will now be obscuring this material)
  - harshreality 14y ago
    Everyone is a publisher. You're in favor of lawsuits against people who run bittorrent clients in a swarm, then, for $22k a song, or even $1000 per song? Any amount enough to be worthwhile as a deterrent is punitive and has the potential to wreck someone's life. Or what about blogs or forums with posted links to copyrighted material on filehosting sites?

nilsbunger 14y ago

Many of us derive our (high) salaries from building software that isn't open-sourced. Copyright is one important layer to prevent the SW from being used for free by everyone. Even Google does this - it never open-sourced its core search infrastructure or google docs/mail/maps/etc products, and it monetizes them. And its open source products like chrome and android are really about creating more "attach" to its proprietary products. Do those who hold the "pro-copying" view believe it's somehow bad that our work (software IP) results in proprietary source code that we are paid for? Or is SW somehow different from someone who spends a lot to create a movie, book or song? I'm honestly curious! (Personally, I'm against SOPA, and skeptical of SW patents, but don't have a problem with copyright).

benologist 14y ago
What we do is different because our work is automagically protected from everything that threatens other forms of IP. And yet it's not at all hypocritical to play fast and easy with everyone else's IP!

forrestthewoods 14y ago

Haha. Well in that case no I strongly do not support what you so generously call "our side". But thanks for throwing my hat into your ring. I support environments that enable and encourage the production of new creative works. I believe that copyright in some form is necessary to support such a system. "A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." - Posner, 1989, An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law

freshhawk 14y ago
> I support environments that enable and encourage the production of new creative works And when something comes along that makes it so easy to share/steal those creative works? What do you do to it? It easy to say "I support free speech and the internet", "I don't support government surveillance of it's citizens" and "environments that enable and encourage the production of new creative works" because saying those things is meaningless. Where do you stand when those things come in conflict with each other and tradeoffs need to be made?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
hxa7241 14y ago

waterlesscloud 14y ago

If you attempt to force me into a binary decision like that, you aren't going to like what I decide.

k-mcgrady 14y ago

Your mixing a lot of different things. I support copyright but don't support SOPA. I'm pro-consumer and freedom but believe content creators (software, music, film etc.) should be allowed to protect their content (to a certain point). There is a big difference between a free exchange of information and wanting everything available to you for free with no restrictions. And copyright != censorship. North Korea's big problem isn't copyright enforcement. Drawing a comparison between North Korea and people who support copyright is a stupid exaggeration.