6 ms·

Hear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with cop

Hear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with copyrighted music in the background.

vaksel 18y ago
Thats MPAA/RIAA's fault. They spent so much effort enforcing bullshit aspects of copyright, that they lost the goodwill of people to enforce the non-BS portion.
- jonursenbach 18y ago
  No, it's our fault for having an archaic copyright system that people are still trying to enforce instead of fixing the root issues.
  - kajecounterhack 18y ago
    Pray tell me, what are these root issues you speak of? I'm mostly in agreement with vaksel. I don't see how the copyright system has anything to do with how the MPAA/RIAA tries to enforce it's copyright upon meaningless things like dancing videos of babies. Which by the way happened http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turns-tables-on-music-industry/ http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turn...
    - tutwabee 18y ago
      The DMCA seems to legally broaden the intellectual property rights of mega-corporations in nasty ways. The RIAA, MPAA, and many electronics corporations frequently abuse these rights, while staying within the law. Maybe the RIAA and MPAA are the good guys. They're just stress-testing the system to work out bugs. Legal loopholes and kinks will be discovered, abused, and patched up much more hastily this way.
    - Xichekolas 18y ago
      Well just to throw it up for consideration, I think granting exclusive rights to a work for "life + 70 years" for an individual and 120 years for a corporation is rather absurd. If the point of copyright was really to encourage artists/writers to produce content, don't you think 25 years would be sufficient time to capitalize on a work? Although I'd even settle for simply "life". The original copyright terms (in 1790) were 14 years with an option to extend once for 14 more. The current system is in place so corporate copyright owners can continue to profit off their long-dead artist's creations... ahem Disney. Nothing made since 1923 has entered the public domain. So yeah, the MPAA/RIAA definitely make bone-headed enforcement decisions, but the underlying system is also broken.
      - Retric 18y ago
        IMO, I think life + 20 is reasonable. To avoid upsetting company's like Disney a fee per work to preserve valuable copyright seems reasonable. I would say 10k / year + 5% of the gross sales would be reasonable. That way you promote new works, but don't need to fight corporations that want copy write to last until the end of time. It's also a good divider between works that people are actually interested in preserving from works that generate little income.
        Xichekolas 18y ago
        I think "life" is sufficient. With that, someone can capitalize on their work for their entire career. Anything past death simply serves to allow offspring to ride the laurels of their parents. As for corporations, I'd be open to a pay-as-you-go system like you propose, only I'd make the payment grow at some exponential percentage. Say the first year costs $1 and the fee grows by 25% a year. Adjusted for 3% inflation, the fees would be something like: Year Fee/yr 1 $1 10 $5.71 25 $104.17 50 $13,169 100 $210 million 150 $3.36 trillion This would put a natural limit on corporate copyright, due to their willingness to pay. With this system, Disney would pay $5,659,799 this year for the Mickey Mouse copyright (assuming it started at 10 cents in 1928, which is assuming 3% inflation backwards from now). By 2033 this would be a billion dollars a year... by 2064 a trillion. (Again, at 3% inflation, a trillion dollars in 2064 is like $200 billion today).
    - jimbokun 18y ago
      The root issue of having copyright laws that enable corporations to sue people for dancing baby videos.
  - jackzombie 18y ago
    I totally agree. I feel that if something is important, than the message should not be only available to people who can afford to read/hear the message, but should be readily available for anyone who is willing to learn. Whenever I read a great book, or hear a great song, I try to promote it as much as possible because I think that it is important that the artist's message is heard and understood by as many people as possible. Some of my favourite 'artists' (such as Franz Kafka and Carl Sagan) held day jobs in professional/scientific fields. I realize that their material is copyrighted, but my point is that art and learning/the spreading of ideas should be done for the sake of art itself or learning itself, not for the sake of profit. I chose those two as examples because they made their living (for the most part) by working at their day jobs, and created their art because they wanted to deliver a message, not because they wanted to get rich.
    - jacoblyles 18y ago
      If someone gets paid for the art they produce, then they can spend their full time on tuning their art. I wonder what the world would be like if Michaelangelo had a day job.
      - moe 18y ago
        I hope you're saying this tongue in cheek because Michelangelo (like most of our great artists btw) ofcourse did have a dayjob. He was struggling for money for the better part of his life, taking on jobs that he hated. Where do you think the "poor artist" or "suffering for art" memes come from? There was no such thing as a "record deal" in the old times either. You had to suffer until your popularity would pay for itself - and without the leverage of mass media, too. There's a great book about Michelangelo by Irvin Stone that I'd wholeheartly recommend to anyone interested. It's not dry teaching material but his life told in the form of a novel: http://www.amazon.com/Agony-Ecstasy-Biographical-Novel-Michelangelo/dp/0451171357 http://www.amazon.com/Agony-Ecstasy-Biographical-Novel-Miche...
        trapper 18y ago
        I'm not sure if what you are saying is that creative people should give their stuff away and suffer until the off chance they get popular and get paid? Just because you want to get their stuff for free? There was no such thing as medical treatment in the old times either, doesn't mean we should stop it. Hell, there was no such thing as reproducing someones creative work for zero cost in the old times either. Does that mean we should stop that? I think our world is better off by having creative people paid to be creative. I know the RIAA are bad news, but I haven't seen any realistic alternative offered.
sangaya 18y ago
The part about the kitten isn't directly relevant to the pirate bay, I'll give you that. Though I look at the cartoon as more of an over all social commentary about our current state of affairs; not "this is our situation." All too often the copyright lawyers said DMCA takedowns against just such videos. Heck they've sent takedowns to youtube because a person was singing copy written music (cough viacom cough). As someone already said and I'm sure many others will agree, the current system is broken. The internet allows for piracy at a scale that far surpasses the scale of sharing tapes among friends, but it's not going away and need to be capitalized on. It's a dirt cheap distribution method that should be used to it's fullest potential. The argument that a pirated copy equals a lost sale is total bunk. I would have bought maybe 1% of what I've downloaded. Why? Cause the other 99% is crap. And I don't know that until I've heard it. I don't hear it until I download it. The radios are owned and controlled so that the one good song on the whole album is played, and the rest isn't. If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down, number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down, number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly falling.....
- vaksel 18y ago
  same goes for movies too, most of them nowadays barely go longer than 1:30.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  "If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down, number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down, number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly falling....." Uh, what? All those facts seem pretty consistent with artists losing sales due to piracy. Fewer new artists and existing artists making less music could indicate that piracy is taking away incentives for people to make music. Even cost per album could be due to trying to re-coup more revenue from falling sales (not saying this is a rational strategy, but not inconsistent with losing music sales to piracy).

Hear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with copyrighted music in the background.

vaksel 18y ago

Thats MPAA/RIAA's fault. They spent so much effort enforcing bullshit aspects of copyright, that they lost the goodwill of people to enforce the non-BS portion.

jonursenbach 18y ago
No, it's our fault for having an archaic copyright system that people are still trying to enforce instead of fixing the root issues.
- kajecounterhack 18y ago
  Pray tell me, what are these root issues you speak of? I'm mostly in agreement with vaksel. I don't see how the copyright system has anything to do with how the MPAA/RIAA tries to enforce it's copyright upon meaningless things like dancing videos of babies. Which by the way happened http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turns-tables-on-music-industry/ http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turn...
  - tutwabee 18y ago
    The DMCA seems to legally broaden the intellectual property rights of mega-corporations in nasty ways. The RIAA, MPAA, and many electronics corporations frequently abuse these rights, while staying within the law. Maybe the RIAA and MPAA are the good guys. They're just stress-testing the system to work out bugs. Legal loopholes and kinks will be discovered, abused, and patched up much more hastily this way.
  - Xichekolas 18y ago
    Well just to throw it up for consideration, I think granting exclusive rights to a work for "life + 70 years" for an individual and 120 years for a corporation is rather absurd. If the point of copyright was really to encourage artists/writers to produce content, don't you think 25 years would be sufficient time to capitalize on a work? Although I'd even settle for simply "life". The original copyright terms (in 1790) were 14 years with an option to extend once for 14 more. The current system is in place so corporate copyright owners can continue to profit off their long-dead artist's creations... ahem Disney. Nothing made since 1923 has entered the public domain. So yeah, the MPAA/RIAA definitely make bone-headed enforcement decisions, but the underlying system is also broken.
    - Retric 18y ago
      IMO, I think life + 20 is reasonable. To avoid upsetting company's like Disney a fee per work to preserve valuable copyright seems reasonable. I would say 10k / year + 5% of the gross sales would be reasonable. That way you promote new works, but don't need to fight corporations that want copy write to last until the end of time. It's also a good divider between works that people are actually interested in preserving from works that generate little income.
      - Xichekolas 18y ago
        I think "life" is sufficient. With that, someone can capitalize on their work for their entire career. Anything past death simply serves to allow offspring to ride the laurels of their parents. As for corporations, I'd be open to a pay-as-you-go system like you propose, only I'd make the payment grow at some exponential percentage. Say the first year costs $1 and the fee grows by 25% a year. Adjusted for 3% inflation, the fees would be something like: Year Fee/yr 1 $1 10 $5.71 25 $104.17 50 $13,169 100 $210 million 150 $3.36 trillion This would put a natural limit on corporate copyright, due to their willingness to pay. With this system, Disney would pay $5,659,799 this year for the Mickey Mouse copyright (assuming it started at 10 cents in 1928, which is assuming 3% inflation backwards from now). By 2033 this would be a billion dollars a year... by 2064 a trillion. (Again, at 3% inflation, a trillion dollars in 2064 is like $200 billion today).
  - jimbokun 18y ago
    The root issue of having copyright laws that enable corporations to sue people for dancing baby videos.
- jackzombie 18y ago
  I totally agree. I feel that if something is important, than the message should not be only available to people who can afford to read/hear the message, but should be readily available for anyone who is willing to learn. Whenever I read a great book, or hear a great song, I try to promote it as much as possible because I think that it is important that the artist's message is heard and understood by as many people as possible. Some of my favourite 'artists' (such as Franz Kafka and Carl Sagan) held day jobs in professional/scientific fields. I realize that their material is copyrighted, but my point is that art and learning/the spreading of ideas should be done for the sake of art itself or learning itself, not for the sake of profit. I chose those two as examples because they made their living (for the most part) by working at their day jobs, and created their art because they wanted to deliver a message, not because they wanted to get rich.
  - jacoblyles 18y ago
    If someone gets paid for the art they produce, then they can spend their full time on tuning their art. I wonder what the world would be like if Michaelangelo had a day job.
    - moe 18y ago
      I hope you're saying this tongue in cheek because Michelangelo (like most of our great artists btw) ofcourse did have a dayjob. He was struggling for money for the better part of his life, taking on jobs that he hated. Where do you think the "poor artist" or "suffering for art" memes come from? There was no such thing as a "record deal" in the old times either. You had to suffer until your popularity would pay for itself - and without the leverage of mass media, too. There's a great book about Michelangelo by Irvin Stone that I'd wholeheartly recommend to anyone interested. It's not dry teaching material but his life told in the form of a novel: http://www.amazon.com/Agony-Ecstasy-Biographical-Novel-Michelangelo/dp/0451171357 http://www.amazon.com/Agony-Ecstasy-Biographical-Novel-Miche...
      - trapper 18y ago
        I'm not sure if what you are saying is that creative people should give their stuff away and suffer until the off chance they get popular and get paid? Just because you want to get their stuff for free? There was no such thing as medical treatment in the old times either, doesn't mean we should stop it. Hell, there was no such thing as reproducing someones creative work for zero cost in the old times either. Does that mean we should stop that? I think our world is better off by having creative people paid to be creative. I know the RIAA are bad news, but I haven't seen any realistic alternative offered.

sangaya 18y ago

The part about the kitten isn't directly relevant to the pirate bay, I'll give you that. Though I look at the cartoon as more of an over all social commentary about our current state of affairs; not "this is our situation." All too often the copyright lawyers said DMCA takedowns against just such videos. Heck they've sent takedowns to youtube because a person was singing copy written music (cough viacom cough). As someone already said and I'm sure many others will agree, the current system is broken. The internet allows for piracy at a scale that far surpasses the scale of sharing tapes among friends, but it's not going away and need to be capitalized on. It's a dirt cheap distribution method that should be used to it's fullest potential. The argument that a pirated copy equals a lost sale is total bunk. I would have bought maybe 1% of what I've downloaded. Why? Cause the other 99% is crap. And I don't know that until I've heard it. I don't hear it until I download it. The radios are owned and controlled so that the one good song on the whole album is played, and the rest isn't. If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down, number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down, number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly falling.....

vaksel 18y ago
same goes for movies too, most of them nowadays barely go longer than 1:30.
jimbokun 18y ago
"If someone can find it I'd be grateful, but WIRED had a chart in an article sometime about 2004 showing that: average length of song is trending down, number of songs per album trending down, number of new artists trending down, number of albums per artist trending down, cost per album trending up, piracy trending up, and sales trending down. So yeah, it must be solely the fault of the internet and those dirty pirates that the music business is slowly falling....." Uh, what? All those facts seem pretty consistent with artists losing sales due to piracy. Fewer new artists and existing artists making less music could indicate that piracy is taking away incentives for people to make music. Even cost per album could be due to trying to re-coup more revenue from falling sales (not saying this is a rational strategy, but not inconsistent with losing music sales to piracy).