3 ms·

Who defines large-scale infringement? Is several hundred torrents in violation of copyright (only a few active at a time) on someone's personal machine large-s

Who defines large-scale infringement? Is several hundred torrents in violation of copyright (only a few active at a time) on someone's personal machine large-scale infringement? Several thousands torrents? A blog dedicated to linking to a handful of files on file download services each week in a very specific content domain? Hundreds per week? What about private torrent trackers? What about file download sites like megaupload? What about forums? You expect them to police other people's content? Strict copyright enforcement advocates love to talk about the cost of illegal sharing. What worthwhile software, movies, music, or books, in your opinion, have failed due to illegal filesharing, or would fail if copyright enforcement were limited to people directly selling copied content without permission?

Silhouette 14y ago
Who defines large-scale infringement? Why does it need anyone to define it? There's a clear practical demarcation here, in that clearly artists can still make a living in the face of low-level background infringement between friends, but some projects are not commercially viable in the face of mass infringement. What worthwhile software, movies, music, or books, in your opinion, have failed due to illegal filesharing, or would fail if copyright enforcement were limited to people directly selling copied content without permission? Well, for one thing, there are small studios and independent artists giving up all the time because people rip them off and they don't have the resources to do anything about it or the scale to absorb the losses as a cost of doing business. But that's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the works that never get made in the first place. Obviously you can never prove that something that doesn't exist would have done, but it doesn't take a genius to look at, say, the computer games industry and see that the modern PC gaming landscape is dominated by episode 17 of FPS clone #6 and sports game #24 2012 season, often complete with console-induced limitations on gameplay and audio/video standards. Today, hardly any studio with the resources to make an innovative game with both novel gameplay and excellent production values is willing to risk it. When only 1 in 10 copies of your game gets paid for if you're lucky, it's not hard to see why. It's not that many people wouldn't enjoy and pay for such a game. It's not that such games don't have the potential to make huge amounts of money. It's just that everyone is so risk-averse that they'll choose the relatively safe bet every time, because the big hits don't bring enough profit to prop up a huge bust with the kinds of budget that AAA games command today. Consequently, what innovation there is tends to come from games with relatively low production values or simple concepts that can scale programmatically without requiring a lot of expensive human creativity. Where is the next Baldur's Gate or Deus Ex? There is actually a team remaking the original BG series right now, and the next DE was... Deus Ex: Human Revolution last year. It shouldn't be this way. With modern technology, independent artists or small groups can create work with better production values than ever. With the rise of the Internet, they have the ability to distribute those new works cheaper, faster and easier than at any time in the history of humanity. The world should be full of new titles. Web forums should be packed with success stories about how the creative people behind those new titles have finally been able to write the book or make the game or record the music they always had inside, and share it for the benefit of everyone. This should be possible because markets big enough to make it financially reasonable to develop those titles while still paying the rent should be enabled by things like social networking and search tools. What is actually happening is that a few people are trying, every now and then there's a Minecraft-scale individual title or a PopCap-scale success story for a small studio made good, and most of the time the potential just dies, because a couple of days after launching a new work, someone has already ripped it off and put it up on a Warez site or torrent or whatever and that's where a lot of the attention is going.
- harshreality 14y ago
  It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them? http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry#History_of_video_game_industry http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry#History_of... You do not get to define market demand for particular types of games. People are willing to spend money on games. The music industry is figuring out that, unlike the 90's, they can't put out a cd with 1 or 2 hits and expect people to buy the whole thing. So yes, sales are down. How much are they saving by shipping fewer CDs? Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs? How will any position on copyright enforcement cause people to forego watching the latest Twilight movie, or buying Harry Potter books, and instead buy the sort of high art or higher art that you seem to think they should be buying? There is no shortage of people willing to buy the FPS clones, pulp fiction books, and popular music that you would decry. Your complaint lies with those people, not pirates.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them? Given that the titles I mentioned were so popular that they spawned entire series, highly rated by fans and critics alike, and as I mention they are still being emulated today... No, I don't your theory there is even slightly plausible. And of course there have been other games in similar genres since then, some of which have been very commercially successful. But they've tended to come with obnoxious DRM, DLC and other silliness in an attempt to keep them that way despite the pirates. My question isn't really about those specific titles, it's about innovation. The games I mentioned either defined or greatly advanced their respective genres for a generation of gamers. Where is the next Doom, the game whose basic concept has just never been done before on that kind of level? The music industry is figuring out that, unlike the 90's, they can't put out a cd with 1 or 2 hits and expect people to buy the whole thing. So yes, sales are down. How much are they saving by shipping fewer CDs? Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs? Part of the trouble with this argument is that you seem to be assuming that most of the cost of creating and distributing good music and good books came from the physical distribution cost, which obviously doesn't apply in the same way for digital distribution. But that's not really the case. For good music and good books -- and to be very clear, I am not talking about "high art" or any such nonsense, I'm just talking about work that is well made -- a large amount of the overall cost is up-front and doesn't change much just because of modern technologies. It's the human factor: having the right team and a well-equipped studio to handle the recording and production for your song, having a skilled editor and qualified proofreaders for a textbook, and so on. Several of my close friends have worked in these industries in various capacities, and they paint a bleak picture of cut corners and cost savings in their industries today. Certainly the books I've bought in recent years myself have been sadly lacking compared to both the editorial quality and production values of a few years ago, and knowing what is going on behind the scenes it's all too clear how that is happening. Sure, there's no excuse for bundling music into "albums" any more. Digitial distribution of individual pieces of music and automatic playlists in every media player application make the whole concept of an album nothing but an artificial marketing tool. Likewise the old fixed page sizes and tight page limits for books have little relevance in a digital world. But the content is what's hard. Writing/performing good material, and elevating the results to the level of professional quality, is hard work and requires real skill. This isn't going to change. No computer AI algorithm is going to spot the way a paragraph is phrased awkwardly because it relies on an idea that isn't introduced definitely until three pages later, at least not any time soon. There's a popular anti-copyright cliche that musical performers should just give their work away as advertising and hope to make a living playing live gigs. Maybe that works for those people, but how does a composer or a lyricist give a live performance? How do editors and researchers make a living when everything they do is about information? How does a level designer or the guy who sketches out the concept art for that great end of level boss that comes to symbolise the entire game? The creative industries are vast machines today, and someone has to pay all these people during the creation/production stage of a work if that work is going to benefit from their skills and expertise. If the realisable profits become so small on a work that it's going to be commercially risky to make it at all, what actually happens is often that either it doesn't get made or it gets made without the help of these skilled people behind the scenes and winds up a worse product for it. And as I keep trying to point out, that doesn't help anyone, including the people who enjoy the work (or would have enjoyed it, if it had been better made).

Silhouette 14y ago

Who defines large-scale infringement? Why does it need anyone to define it? There's a clear practical demarcation here, in that clearly artists can still make a living in the face of low-level background infringement between friends, but some projects are not commercially viable in the face of mass infringement. What worthwhile software, movies, music, or books, in your opinion, have failed due to illegal filesharing, or would fail if copyright enforcement were limited to people directly selling copied content without permission? Well, for one thing, there are small studios and independent artists giving up all the time because people rip them off and they don't have the resources to do anything about it or the scale to absorb the losses as a cost of doing business. But that's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the works that never get made in the first place. Obviously you can never prove that something that doesn't exist would have done, but it doesn't take a genius to look at, say, the computer games industry and see that the modern PC gaming landscape is dominated by episode 17 of FPS clone #6 and sports game #24 2012 season, often complete with console-induced limitations on gameplay and audio/video standards. Today, hardly any studio with the resources to make an innovative game with both novel gameplay and excellent production values is willing to risk it. When only 1 in 10 copies of your game gets paid for if you're lucky, it's not hard to see why. It's not that many people wouldn't enjoy and pay for such a game. It's not that such games don't have the potential to make huge amounts of money. It's just that everyone is so risk-averse that they'll choose the relatively safe bet every time, because the big hits don't bring enough profit to prop up a huge bust with the kinds of budget that AAA games command today. Consequently, what innovation there is tends to come from games with relatively low production values or simple concepts that can scale programmatically without requiring a lot of expensive human creativity. Where is the next Baldur's Gate or Deus Ex? There is actually a team remaking the original BG series right now, and the next DE was... Deus Ex: Human Revolution last year. It shouldn't be this way. With modern technology, independent artists or small groups can create work with better production values than ever. With the rise of the Internet, they have the ability to distribute those new works cheaper, faster and easier than at any time in the history of humanity. The world should be full of new titles. Web forums should be packed with success stories about how the creative people behind those new titles have finally been able to write the book or make the game or record the music they always had inside, and share it for the benefit of everyone. This should be possible because markets big enough to make it financially reasonable to develop those titles while still paying the rent should be enabled by things like social networking and search tools. What is actually happening is that a few people are trying, every now and then there's a Minecraft-scale individual title or a PopCap-scale success story for a small studio made good, and most of the time the potential just dies, because a couple of days after launching a new work, someone has already ripped it off and put it up on a Warez site or torrent or whatever and that's where a lot of the attention is going.

harshreality 14y ago
It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them? http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry#History_of_video_game_industry http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry#History_of... You do not get to define market demand for particular types of games. People are willing to spend money on games. The music industry is figuring out that, unlike the 90's, they can't put out a cd with 1 or 2 hits and expect people to buy the whole thing. So yes, sales are down. How much are they saving by shipping fewer CDs? Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs? How will any position on copyright enforcement cause people to forego watching the latest Twilight movie, or buying Harry Potter books, and instead buy the sort of high art or higher art that you seem to think they should be buying? There is no shortage of people willing to buy the FPS clones, pulp fiction books, and popular music that you would decry. Your complaint lies with those people, not pirates.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  It couldn't possibly be that those titles that you want to see are not being developed because few people want them? Given that the titles I mentioned were so popular that they spawned entire series, highly rated by fans and critics alike, and as I mention they are still being emulated today... No, I don't your theory there is even slightly plausible. And of course there have been other games in similar genres since then, some of which have been very commercially successful. But they've tended to come with obnoxious DRM, DLC and other silliness in an attempt to keep them that way despite the pirates. My question isn't really about those specific titles, it's about innovation. The games I mentioned either defined or greatly advanced their respective genres for a generation of gamers. Where is the next Doom, the game whose basic concept has just never been done before on that kind of level? The music industry is figuring out that, unlike the 90's, they can't put out a cd with 1 or 2 hits and expect people to buy the whole thing. So yes, sales are down. How much are they saving by shipping fewer CDs? Book sales may be stagnant or declining, but units are up, and a similar argument applies: how much of the falling gross revenue is offset by reduced distribution costs? Part of the trouble with this argument is that you seem to be assuming that most of the cost of creating and distributing good music and good books came from the physical distribution cost, which obviously doesn't apply in the same way for digital distribution. But that's not really the case. For good music and good books -- and to be very clear, I am not talking about "high art" or any such nonsense, I'm just talking about work that is well made -- a large amount of the overall cost is up-front and doesn't change much just because of modern technologies. It's the human factor: having the right team and a well-equipped studio to handle the recording and production for your song, having a skilled editor and qualified proofreaders for a textbook, and so on. Several of my close friends have worked in these industries in various capacities, and they paint a bleak picture of cut corners and cost savings in their industries today. Certainly the books I've bought in recent years myself have been sadly lacking compared to both the editorial quality and production values of a few years ago, and knowing what is going on behind the scenes it's all too clear how that is happening. Sure, there's no excuse for bundling music into "albums" any more. Digitial distribution of individual pieces of music and automatic playlists in every media player application make the whole concept of an album nothing but an artificial marketing tool. Likewise the old fixed page sizes and tight page limits for books have little relevance in a digital world. But the content is what's hard. Writing/performing good material, and elevating the results to the level of professional quality, is hard work and requires real skill. This isn't going to change. No computer AI algorithm is going to spot the way a paragraph is phrased awkwardly because it relies on an idea that isn't introduced definitely until three pages later, at least not any time soon. There's a popular anti-copyright cliche that musical performers should just give their work away as advertising and hope to make a living playing live gigs. Maybe that works for those people, but how does a composer or a lyricist give a live performance? How do editors and researchers make a living when everything they do is about information? How does a level designer or the guy who sketches out the concept art for that great end of level boss that comes to symbolise the entire game? The creative industries are vast machines today, and someone has to pay all these people during the creation/production stage of a work if that work is going to benefit from their skills and expertise. If the realisable profits become so small on a work that it's going to be commercially risky to make it at all, what actually happens is often that either it doesn't get made or it gets made without the help of these skilled people behind the scenes and winds up a worse product for it. And as I keep trying to point out, that doesn't help anyone, including the people who enjoy the work (or would have enjoyed it, if it had been better made).