8 ms·

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 suppo

by 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?
    - ghshephard 14y ago
      The challenge here is to recognize there is a happy medium. " pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) " There is a difference between someone who sells indexed warez/books/movies/music on a retail site, and someone running a bit torrent client. Aggressively pursue the first, and educate the second. Simply having the ISP send a warning notice of copyright infringement to the account holder of an IP address, without in any way communicating back to the rightsholder _who_ that IP Address holder was, is a nice medium. Note - just because it's easy to run a bit-torrent client sharing the latest GameOfThrones Books (all available via Kindle, or the library) doesn't mean it's legal (or even ethical). Re: Posted Links to copyrighted material - depends on how organized / indexed those links are. If it's a casual site with a few links pointing out, clearly that falls under fair use. If it has carefully indexed/searchable database of 750,000 songs, and 35,000 movies,, and 250,000 books in such a way that you just have to visit that site, click a link, and download the content - well, perhaps there needs to be a conversation. But reasonable people can come up with reasonable solutions. It doesn't have to be "All Sharing, All the Time" - nor does it have to be "Idiotic Draconian RIAA $22K/Song to some random bit torrent user"
- praxulus 14y ago
  The middle ground is supporting copyright law, but not expecting to have 100% enforcement of it. This is exactly what we have right now.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    And as the infringement moves to a more distributed network? When there aren't Kim Dotcoms to take down? That's where things are going right now, because of technological improvement and the current selective law enforcement we have right now. That's what this conversation is about I thought, what we have right now is a system in transition.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      The big problem for rightsholders with copyright infringement on the Internet is scale. In the anonymised but highly connected world of today's Internet, one site hosting infringing content can easily supply it to thousands of people within a matter of hours, and one P2P network can involve numerous people each helping the others to share infringing copies without even knowing who those others are. The thing you keep ignoring is that this only works because of the public but anonymous nature of sharing material using these tools. You can't cause damage on that kind of scale if you're only sharing between a few friends that you can immediately identify, and the low level of infringement that such an arrangement might support is little different from the old days of trading music tapes in the school playground. In practice, the realisable value of a major copyright-protected work, the kind of thing that costs millions to make and sells very many tickets/copies/whatever, is mostly collected within the first few days anyway. If a DRM system on a game holds off mass infringement for even a few weeks before the cracks come out, it's probably achieved 90+% of its potential. If a movie studio can keep a decent copy of a new blockbuster off the torrents even past the opening weekend, that's a huge benefit. Similarly, if rightsholders could reduce copyright infringement to something that really was a social activity rather than a massive industrial exercise, the benefits would be enormous even if that low level of illegal copying was still going on in the background. So, all they have to do to defeat all these hypothetical future scenarios of yours is sign up for the same public but anonymous networks, record who is providing and/or downloading infringing material via their node, and then bring legal action against them both to reclaim their costs and actual damages and to identify the next links in the chain. Given that at this point we are talking about people who are known to have been breaking the law, I don't have a problem with the legal system providing for modest and realistic assumptions about actual damages but also awarding substantial costs to make these kinds of investigations and legitimate legal actions financially viable. Given reasonable safeguards to protect genuinely accidental/occasional indiscretions, I also don't have a problem with somewhat heavyweight actions like enlisting the help of ISPs to trace content that is now known to have been infringing back to its earlier sources, or imposing penalties on services that are known to be used for say anonymising transmissions but refuse to co-operate when an illegal action has been identified. It will be harder to do this than just cutting off a handful of obvious, high-profile targets today, of course, but just as no DRM system can completely protect a movie that you can actually watch, so no distributed P2P system can completely anonymise where traffic came from. Just make sure any costs associated with these additional burdens are borne only by those who are found in court to have broken the law, and you probably have an effective deterrent that really is based on actual damages and measurable costs rather than absurd artificial estimates.
- gphil 14y ago
  >> Not when you think it all the way through to taking actual action to protect copyrighted works. I think copyright protection is very possible without "abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy." I suppose if I didn't then I would agree with you. I'm not so concerned with some individuals obtaining digital content without paying for it (I agree this would be basically impossible to enforce without trampling on civil liberties), as I am with companies systematically ripping off copyrighted work and re-selling it as their own. In the latter case, I would argue that copyright can quite easily be enforced by litigation within the existing system, without any threat to individual freedom.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    I agree, but as things continue to change? (will link to comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368387 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368387 rather than typing it again)

by 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?
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    The challenge here is to recognize there is a happy medium. " pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) " There is a difference between someone who sells indexed warez/books/movies/music on a retail site, and someone running a bit torrent client. Aggressively pursue the first, and educate the second. Simply having the ISP send a warning notice of copyright infringement to the account holder of an IP address, without in any way communicating back to the rightsholder _who_ that IP Address holder was, is a nice medium. Note - just because it's easy to run a bit-torrent client sharing the latest GameOfThrones Books (all available via Kindle, or the library) doesn't mean it's legal (or even ethical). Re: Posted Links to copyrighted material - depends on how organized / indexed those links are. If it's a casual site with a few links pointing out, clearly that falls under fair use. If it has carefully indexed/searchable database of 750,000 songs, and 35,000 movies,, and 250,000 books in such a way that you just have to visit that site, click a link, and download the content - well, perhaps there needs to be a conversation. But reasonable people can come up with reasonable solutions. It doesn't have to be "All Sharing, All the Time" - nor does it have to be "Idiotic Draconian RIAA $22K/Song to some random bit torrent user"
praxulus 14y ago
The middle ground is supporting copyright law, but not expecting to have 100% enforcement of it. This is exactly what we have right now.
- freshhawk 14y ago
  And as the infringement moves to a more distributed network? When there aren't Kim Dotcoms to take down? That's where things are going right now, because of technological improvement and the current selective law enforcement we have right now. That's what this conversation is about I thought, what we have right now is a system in transition.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    The big problem for rightsholders with copyright infringement on the Internet is scale. In the anonymised but highly connected world of today's Internet, one site hosting infringing content can easily supply it to thousands of people within a matter of hours, and one P2P network can involve numerous people each helping the others to share infringing copies without even knowing who those others are. The thing you keep ignoring is that this only works because of the public but anonymous nature of sharing material using these tools. You can't cause damage on that kind of scale if you're only sharing between a few friends that you can immediately identify, and the low level of infringement that such an arrangement might support is little different from the old days of trading music tapes in the school playground. In practice, the realisable value of a major copyright-protected work, the kind of thing that costs millions to make and sells very many tickets/copies/whatever, is mostly collected within the first few days anyway. If a DRM system on a game holds off mass infringement for even a few weeks before the cracks come out, it's probably achieved 90+% of its potential. If a movie studio can keep a decent copy of a new blockbuster off the torrents even past the opening weekend, that's a huge benefit. Similarly, if rightsholders could reduce copyright infringement to something that really was a social activity rather than a massive industrial exercise, the benefits would be enormous even if that low level of illegal copying was still going on in the background. So, all they have to do to defeat all these hypothetical future scenarios of yours is sign up for the same public but anonymous networks, record who is providing and/or downloading infringing material via their node, and then bring legal action against them both to reclaim their costs and actual damages and to identify the next links in the chain. Given that at this point we are talking about people who are known to have been breaking the law, I don't have a problem with the legal system providing for modest and realistic assumptions about actual damages but also awarding substantial costs to make these kinds of investigations and legitimate legal actions financially viable. Given reasonable safeguards to protect genuinely accidental/occasional indiscretions, I also don't have a problem with somewhat heavyweight actions like enlisting the help of ISPs to trace content that is now known to have been infringing back to its earlier sources, or imposing penalties on services that are known to be used for say anonymising transmissions but refuse to co-operate when an illegal action has been identified. It will be harder to do this than just cutting off a handful of obvious, high-profile targets today, of course, but just as no DRM system can completely protect a movie that you can actually watch, so no distributed P2P system can completely anonymise where traffic came from. Just make sure any costs associated with these additional burdens are borne only by those who are found in court to have broken the law, and you probably have an effective deterrent that really is based on actual damages and measurable costs rather than absurd artificial estimates.
gphil 14y ago
>> Not when you think it all the way through to taking actual action to protect copyrighted works. I think copyright protection is very possible without "abandoning some of the fundamentals of western democracy." I suppose if I didn't then I would agree with you. I'm not so concerned with some individuals obtaining digital content without paying for it (I agree this would be basically impossible to enforce without trampling on civil liberties), as I am with companies systematically ripping off copyrighted work and re-selling it as their own. In the latter case, I would argue that copyright can quite easily be enforced by litigation within the existing system, without any threat to individual freedom.
- freshhawk 14y ago
  I agree, but as things continue to change? (will link to comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368387 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4368387 rather than typing it again)